Teresa Polk reports on the pro-family demonstration in Madrid that had a crowd of perhaps 2 million people. As is usual in the media this is described as tens of thousands of people, though even the NYT mentioned an estimate of 1.5 million people. The protest was organized in response to new Spanish laws recognizing homosexual unions and making divorce more readily available and included speeches on pro-life.

Interestingly Pope Benedict XVI spoke via a video screen to the people at the demonstration.

“Founded in the indissoluble union between man and woman, it is the place in which human life is sheltered and protected from its beginning until its natural end,” Pope Benedict said.

I was glad to find that the above picture was not the Pope's speech to the Lilliputians.

Deal Hudson wonders if pro-life leaders here in the United States have ever asked the Pope to do the same thing for the March of Life? That would be great if he did since surely the March of Life contains a lot of Catholics and other churches and groups surely recognize the role the Pope's have played in the pro-life cause.

Here is a headline that doesn't sound quite right.

A small, highly religious town in southwest Louisiana has finally gained the right to change their 666 area code, which they consider a stigma. For 40 years the town of Reeves, La., has battled to change the phone prefix, but has failed at least four times, Mayor Scott Walker told The Associated Press.

But beginning this month, residents and businesses can apply to change their area code from 666 to 749.

�This boils down to, this is a very, very religious community,� Walker said, according to AP. The town has three churches, two Bible and one Baptist, in a community with less than 450 homes.

This reminds me of another recent story.

The highway that stretches from Laredo to Duluth, Minn., has grabbed the attention of Christians across the country, including those in Austin.

Members of Christian groups along the I-35 corridor said the highway was mentioned in the Bible, and in order to fulfill a prophecy, it needs a little saving first. According to Light The Highway, the worldwide movement is driving thousands to prayer on the interstate. Christians said the Old Testament's book of Isaiah prophesizes I-35 will be the United States' "Highway of Holiness." Isaiah 35:8 reads: "And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that Way; wicked fools will not go about on it."

"Everything we do, we want to make sure scripture is backing us up," said Austin's PromiseLand Church Pastor Charlie Lujan. "I-35 being Isaiah 35, it just matched."

Friends don't let friends use Sola Scriptura.

Recently in the news has been the story of the 69 year old pro-life man who was assaulted outside of an abortion clinic and knocked unconscious. Pro-lifers are not surprised that this is not getting reported on knowing the media bias. Though I am surprised to find out that the police interviewed the assailant and then let him leave.

Gerald in a post titled The "narrative of the transgendered" writes:

Deconstructionism is entrenched in Academia. Nothing is what it is, only a person's "narrative" is true. Everything is a construct. Male and female ? Constructs imposed by society. Unfortunately, politicians like Schwarzenegger are either giving in to or promoting the ideology of these fiends. Because they hysterically bitch, people give in to their demands, hoping they'll go away. Corporations are even more cowardly than politicians, since they can be hurt where it counts. These leftist enemies of society wield power far beyond their numbers. How else could one explain the absurd accomodation of the mentally ill "transgendered" people? If you think to yourself, "Man, I feel like a woman", you're free to use the women's restroom. After all, it's your "narrative", "your truth" that counts, everything else is a societal "construct". This is niftily protected by the BS known as hate crime laws - federal, no less. Mind you, I don't care if some dude looks like a lady, but you can't convince me, under penalty of law, that it's just as "normal". I never had a problem with tolerance, when it meant that you live and let live. But, nowadays, if you don't accept that 2+4=666, you're prone to be sent to the re-education camp. It is what Nietzsche called the Umwertung aller Werte - the "re-evaluation" of all values. In order for wrong to be right, right must become wrong.

And then goes on to link to an article in the Opinion Journal "Crossing Over: What will prevent the 250-pound linebacker from deciding he wants to share the locker room with the cheerleaders?"

Which makes me wonder if people can be transgendered why not trans-race? I mean if biology lies and people who are biologically of one sex and feel that they are another sex can advance this position and seen as perfectly normal why can't other equal positions be advanced without ridicule? Surely if something like XX and XY karyotypes mean nothing than the amount of melanin in your skin along with other physical racial characteristics also mean nothing if the person "feels" that they are of another race.

I wonder what would happen if someone applied for a minority scholarship at a university even though they were white and then said "I always felt I was a black man and never felt comfortable as a white man." Most likely they would be given directions to the latest psychiatric ward. Too bad they don't apply the same common sense to those who think they are transgendered and the ridiculous idea that their biology lies. Though if President Clinton could be called the first "black president" by fellow liberals than why can't others say they belong to some race other their own. Having a problem getting a job because of affirmative action? All you have to do is to find that you feel that you belong to a minority group currently favored by a quota.

In modern liberalism feelings always trump facts which is why those who have a mental illness and think they are transgendered don't get treatment, but special treatment as a protected class.

Since I am current reading the outstanding biography of St. Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd (The Life of Thomas More) it is interesting to make a comparison between this saint and the saint who is celebrated today -- St. Thomas Becket.

Interestingly they were both born within 20 yards of each other but a little over three hundred years apart. Both wore hair shirts under their fine clothing ,though Thomas More started doing this early in his life and Thomas Becket accepted the practice towards the end of their life. They both ended up being Load Chancellor and both ended up being martyred defending the rights of the Church against the King (Henry II, Henry VIII). In both cases this included defending the Primacy of Peter.

Though St. Thomas Becket is truly someone who grew in office. In the U.S. they refer to Supreme Court justices who become more liberal during their time on the court as growing in office, but Thomas Becket truly grew in office since he grew in holiness. No one would have pegged Thomas Becket as someone likely to be martyred earlier in his career. His appointment as the Archbishop of Canterbury was largely a political appointment with Henry II thinking he was stacking this position in his favor. Yet St. Thomas Becket became an ascetic and took his duties seriously and defended the Church against local control of the Church.

It has been reported that Henry II said "Who will rid me of this turbulent (or troublesome ) priest?" or something along that and his command was taken as authority to kill the Archbishop. You do wish there were more troublesome priests/bishops in England today that annoyed politicians.

Reading the Liturgy of the Hours this morning it reminded me of what the International Theological Commission said in their document this year "The Hope of salvation for infants who die without being baptised."

5. Secondly, taking account of the principle lex orandi lex credendi, the Christian community notes that there is no mention of Limbo in the liturgy. In fact, the liturgy contains a feast of the Holy Innocents, who are venerated as martyrs, even though they were not baptised, because they were killed “on account of Christ”. There has even been an important liturgical development through the introduction of funerals for infants who died without Baptism. We do not pray for those who are damned. The Roman Missal of 1970 introduced a Funeral Mass for unbaptised infants whose parents intended to present them for Baptism. The Church entrusts to God’s mercy those infants who die unbaptised. In its 1980 Instruction on Children’s Baptism, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reaffirmed that: “with regard to children who die without having received Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as indeed she does in the funeral rite established for them”. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) adds that: “the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved [1Tim 2:4], and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused him to say: ‘Let the children come to me, do not hinder them’ (Mk 10:14), allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism”

On a quick trip to Rome a few weeks ago, I made it a point to visit the Gesu, the mother church of the Society of Jesus, and to pray for the Jesuits and their general congregation opening January 7. I found much of the church's magnificent Baroque interior concealed by scaffolding set up for a housecleaning before that crucial event.

The symbolism couldn't have been more apt. Just as the Gesu, in the historic heart of Rome, needed renovating, so does the Society itself. Rather than operating at the cutting edge of the Church, Jesuits in recent decades have fallen increasingly behind the times and, not unlike the Gesu, now stand in need of some serious renewing.

This is not an anti-Jesuit polemic. I am grateful for the education I received from the Society. Over the years I've known many Jesuits, and most have been — and still are — admirable men, loyal sons of the Church deeply devoted to the service of the people of God. Many have been, and still are, my friends. Yet as 217 Jesuits from around the world convene at the Society's headquarters near St. Peter's Square for the 35th general congregation in the order's history, they face the challenge of not only electing a new General Superior but setting directions for a body in long-running crisis.

Business as usual won't work. The Jesuits need an overhaul and they need it soon. Numbers underscore the urgency. Forty years ago there were 35,000 Jesuits in the world. Now there are 19,000. The dropoff has been even steeper in the United States, where the Society counted over 8,000 members in 1965 and now has under 3,000.

...Two years ago Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., General Superior of the Society since 1983, announced that he would retire in 2008 when he turned 80. The delegates to the 35th general congregation have the task of choosing a successor and setting policy for the years ahead. People who care about the Jesuits should wish them much success. That's what I prayed for at the Gesu when I was there.

The problem with so many religious orders and what is evident with the Jesuits that instead of refocusing on their orders charism and jettisoning what gets in the way of it they also jettisoned essentials. It is like the old comedies taking place on a train where pieces of the train are taken apart to feed the boiler and everything else is thrown over the side to keep it moving. Vatican II's Perfactae Caritatis called for a "constant return to the sources of all Christian life and to the original spirit of the institutes" not throwing the surrender flag to modernity.

Unfortunately Jesuits being faithful to the Magisterium are the exceptions and not the rule, but I certainly do hope and pray that an election of a new General Superior of the Society can help them return to the Jesuits of old that will take their charism into the modern world in a more faithful way.

The questions is will they elect someone who realizes just how far the Society has fallen or someone that will say the parrot is not dead. The current Jesuit General had this to say in an interview this year.

In recent years, the Society of Jesus has seen a drop in candidates for the novitiate. What are the reasons?

Sometimes we forget that a religious family is, in a happy expression of the Second Vatican Council, ‘a gift of the Spirit to the church.’ The church can’t be the church without clergy and laity, but it can be church without religious life in its present form. The church lived for centuries without the Jesuits! … Religious families are born and they disappear, not because they did something wrong, but because the church requires other gifts to meet other needs of the people of God. The simple fact that today a young man who wants to put himself at the service of the church doesn’t necessarily have to choose between the seminary and the novitiate, but can also find his mission in one of the new ecclesial movements that are also a gift of the Spirit, changes the whole context of consecrated life.

Over the years, you’ve handled delicate relationships between some Jesuit theologians and the Vatican. What are the necessary limits, and what’s the space for welcoming a plurality of theological reflection in the Society?

[Theology] unfolds today in a nervous atmosphere of conflicts and polarization, in which everything is immediately classified as either ‘right’ or ‘left,’ as conservatism or progressive thought. Even a constructive critique by a theologian, based on deep competence, pastoral concern and discernment born in prayer, runs the risk of being taken up by the mass media in a partial fashion (either unwittingly or deliberately) in order to turn it into front-page news. On the other hand, the church can’t renounce its right, and its duty, to protect the faithful against errors or possibly erroneous interpretations of a given theological work, even if it’s valid in itself. In this context, which at first blush can seem discouraging, it’s important to be grateful for so many theologians – among them, not just a few Jesuits – who provide the church the indispensable service of positive, clear and creative theological reflection, which serves the greater good of the whole church in its socio-cultural diversity.

No wonder that out of the really small number of theologians that have been investigated by the CDF, four of them have been Jesuits. You also get the feeling the Jesuit theologian he is praising are not in the mode of Cardinal Dulles, S.J. May the next "Black Pope" have a lot firmer ideas about both the charism of their founder and an understanding of the problems.

From a CNS article

As for Pope Benedict's use of older, much taller miters, Msgr. Marini said they are a sign of how the church moves forward in history without ignoring or forgetting its past.

"Just as in his documents, a pope cites the pontiffs who preceded him in order to indicate the continuity of the church's magisterium, so in the liturgical sphere, a pope uses the vestments and sacred furnishings" of previous popes, demonstrating a continuity in prayer, he said.

I wonder how in the world anybody at a Catholic High School would think it would be a good idea to rent out their gymnasium for a Sen. Obama campaign stop. But Newman Catholic High School in Mason City, Iowa must have thought so. Here is a senator as pro-abortion as they come who as a state senator did what he could to block a Illinois state version of the born alive infants act. He voted to block the partial birth abortion ban and is in favor of embryonic stem-cell research. He is also in favor of homosexual marriage. So you have a Senator in favor of not only abortion but infanticide once the child is born and yet he is allowed to boost his campaign at a Catholic High School.

Though I am also not in favor of any candidates at any level of office speaking either in Catholic churches or Catholic schools.

As a side note I do wonder what the Obama banner covers up on the knight's shield and especially wonder if it might be a cross?

One of the nice side effects of becoming Catholic is that I have opened up my reading horizons. Most often I would read from SF and Fantasy, then with a smattering of military fiction, horror, suspected novels, and an occasional mystery and perhaps whatever might catch my eye in the new book stack at the library. Since my conversion I have opened up to a much wider world of literature based on recommendations from other Catholics.

I just finished In This House Of Brede by Rumer Godden and I was just about stunned at how good of a novel this is. The story takes place in a made-up Benedictine abbey in England as a career women finds she has a vocation and leaves her successful career behind her to become a nun. This book is certainly no pious stereotype of perfect contemplative nuns, but instead a book that reads more like an autobiography than a novel. The characters in the story are so real that you forget you are reading a novel. From the abbess down to the novices each person described could easily find their counterpart in real life.

Rumer Godden who his the author os some sixty books wrote this book after her conversion to Catholicism and spent three years living outside of a Benedictine abbey researching for this book. Her research certainly pays off because there is such an authenticity to her description of the Benedictine life and the struggles among the nuns to grow in holiness. There is also much wisdom in the book given as advice among the nuns that shows the author must have had a very deep understanding of living the spiritual life. The prose in the book is just a joy to read and there were many points where I dog-eared a page to be able to go back to something that was written. This is something that I pretty much never do with fiction. At one point she explains to one of her subordinates about being enclosed in the abbey.

"Enclosed?" this unfamiliar word seemed to ring in Penny's ears. "You mea-shut up?"

"Not shut up. The walls are not to keep us in but to keep you out."

"But why?"

"An enclosed order is like a kind of power house, " said Mrs. Talbot. "A powerhouse of prayer; you protect a power house not to enclose the power, but to stop unauthorized people getting in to hinder its working."

This book being written in the aftermath of the Vatican Council you also get some of the feel in the abbey of some of the whirlwind of changes that were affecting religious life, though you only get the feel of this towards the very end of the book. But you certainly get the idea that the author was less than pleased with some of the changes for change sake made. One of the nuns laments and dreads the idea of the priest praying Mass facing the community saying it will be as if the priest is giving a performance and not leading us to God as he faces the altar. Though the majority of the book does not give in to criticisms but the daily life and difficulties of these nuns in community.

This is a great novel from a wonderful writer and one I look forward to reading more of.

Julie from Happy Catholic has been reading from another of the author's books called China Court. Julie got permission to read this on her Forgotten Classics podcast even though the book is still in copyright. Check it out here .

A reader sent me this lovely story.

While surfing the Internet earlier this month, a Cincinnati Jew found a way to help his Christian friends and celebrate the Christmas spirit.

Jeff Harris, a lawyer with a Downtown law firm, was reading a story noting that someone had stolen a Baby Jesus figurine from a Bal Harbor, Fla., Nativity scene.

Harris dipped into his pocket and paid for a replacement.

“I’m Jewish and Christian people have always done nice things to me,” Harris said Monday.

A lawyer for 31 years, Harris read of the theft from Dina Cellini’s private Nativity scene in Bal Harbor, on the barrier islands immediately east of near Miami.

Believing the Nativity scene was municipal property, Harris sent am e-mail to city officials asking if he could pay for a replacement Baby Jesus.

“Each Christmas season as a thank you to all my Christian friends I try to do something to acknowledge what a great country this is to live in and to acknowledge the tolerance and good will of the Christian community,” Harris wrote in an e-mail to Bal Harbor officials.

Harris sent the e-mail Dec. 5 – the first day of Hanukkah. Officials forwarded the e-mail to Cellini.

“I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited but, by the same token, I thought it might be a prank,” Cellini said Monday.

A Florida attorney, Cellini looked Harris up and confirmed he was a Cincinnati lawyer.

She called him to accept his generous offer to buy the replacement Baby Jesus. made in the Renaissance style.

The figurine was made in Italy but Cellini was told by the company that it had one in Chicago.

Harris called the company, bought it and had it shipped to Florida.

“This is unbelievable. He’s a complete stranger, has no connection to south Florida,” Cellini said Monday.

“He did this out of the goodness of his heart. It’s a beautiful gesture.”

The Vatican unveils their Nativity scene with the four not so little drummer boys.

Sandro Magister comments on and posts in full Pope Benedict's pre-Christmas address to the Roman curia three day.

..To be disciples of Christ - what does this mean? In the first place, it means coming to know him. How does this happen? It is an invitation to listen to him as He speaks to us in the text of the Sacred Scripture, as He addresses himself to us and comes to meet us in the common prayer of the Church, in the Sacraments, and in the witness of the saints.

One can never get to know Christ only theoretically. One can master the knowledge of the Sacred Scriptures, without ever having met Him. Integral to knowing Him is walking together with Him, entering into his sentiments, as the letter to the Philippians says (2:5). Paul briefly describes these sentiments as follows: having the same love, forming together one soul (sýmpsychoi), going in agreement, not doing anything out of rivalry or vainglory, each not looking out only for his own interests, but also for those of others (2:24).

Catechesis can never be only an intellectual instruction, it must also always become an apprenticeship in communion of life with Christ, an exercise in humility, justice, and love. Only in this way do we walk together with Jesus Christ along his way; only in this way is the eye of our heart opened; only in this way do we learn to understand the Scriptures, and encounter Him.

The encounter with Jesus Christ requires listening, it requires a response in prayer and in the practice of what He tells us. In coming to know Christ, we come to know God, and it is only by beginning from God that we understand man and the world, a world that otherwise remains a meaningless question.

Becoming disciples of Christ is, therefore, a journey of education toward our true being, toward authentic human existence.

...In this regard, I am pleased to recall the letter kindly sent to me last October 13 by 138 Muslim religious leaders, to testify to their common commitment to the promotion of peace in the world. With joy I responded by expressing my steadfast adherence to such noble intentions, and at the same time emphasizing the urgency of a common effort for the protection of the values of mutual respect, dialogue, and collaboration. Shared recognition of the existence of one God, the provident Creator and universal Judge of each one's behavior, constitutes the premise of common action in defense of the effective respect of the dignity of each human person, to build a more just and supportive society.

But does this desire for dialogue and collaboration at the same time mean, perhaps, that we can no longer transmit the message of Jesus Christ, no longer propose to men and to the world this call and the hope that is derived from it? Those who have recognized a great truth, those who have found a great joy must transmit it; they simply cannot keep it for themselves. Gifts so great are never intended for just one person.

Fr. Z posts a great article on liturgical music from Michael Knox Beran at National Review.

But if good music does not always save the soul, bad music never does. When the electric guitar sounds during the Sacrifice of the Mass, the cherubim weep.

I don't know about the cherubim weeping, but I can certainly shed a tear when this happens and it is not a tear of joy. As someone who plays the electric guitar and who is a certified head banger I never want to hear electric guitar used in the liturgy and think only very rarely that an acoustic guitar can be used in the liturgy properly.

*Is.11:1 and Rom.15:12

Related post - The Mathsiah

BAL HARBOUR, Fla. — A baby Jesus statue, part of a Nativity scene here, will be equipped with a Global Positioning System after the disappearance of a previous statue, which had been bolted down.

"I don't anticipate this will ever happen again," said Dina Cellini, who oversees the display, "but we may need to rely on technology to save our savior."

The Mary and Joseph statues will also be fitted with GPS devices, she said. The devices are being bought with residents' contributions and Cellini's own money. Cellini has also installed a Plexiglas screen in front of the display.

Do you know where you Baby Jesus in your Nativity set is? With the rash of Baby Jesus thefts across the country whether it be public or private land how can you be sure? Do your check your lawn often fearing some Nativity scene napper with who know what nefarious scheme? Or perchance that it will be stolen only to be returned later with glued on devil horns as happened recently in Norwalk, Connecticut. Have you considered even resorting to using a chain attached to the leg of the Baby Jesus regardless of the aesthetics of this act? If so you might consider our new product - Find Jesus®! Our plastic Baby Jesus plastic doll product Find Jesus® comes with and embedded GPS transmitter, external antenna, and combined with our unique receiver you will know where it is at all time. You won't be omnipresence, but you will know where Jesus is at all time. No more late night worries or concerns will plague you. This GPS loop transmitting antenna cleverly disguised as a halo will ensure that you can track your Baby Jesus no matter where it is taken The provided GPS receiver will help you track down your property if it does come up missing. This small compact unit will give you an exact location at every moment. If it detects that it has been moved from the preset position an alarm is sounded immediately. Simply follow the onscreen and audible instructions to retrieve your Baby Jesus or to provide the police with its location. Jesus tells the parable of the lost sheep which he was willing to go look for and find. Return the favor and Find Jesus®. You might wonder how we can offer such compact and beyond state of the art technology? We have developed a new process called Niño Technology. Niño Technology provides very small programmed machines that operate the receiver and transmitter. So do you know where your Baby Jesus is? You will if you have Find Jesus®

Tony Blair joins Catholic Church

Former prime minister Tony Blair has left the Anglican Church to become a Roman Catholic.

His wife and children are already Catholic and there had been speculation he would convert after leaving office.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Conner, who led the service to welcome Mr Blair, said he was "very glad" to do so.

Last year, Mr Blair, who is now a Middle East peace envoy, said he had prayed to God when deciding whether or not to send UK troops into Iraq.

And one of Mr Blair’s final official trips while prime minister was a visit to the Vatican in June where he met Pope Benedict XVI.

‘Regular worshipper’

Mr Blair was received into full communion with the Catholic Church during Mass at Archbishop’s House, Westminster, on Friday.

Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, who is the head of Catholics in England and Wales, said: "I am very glad to welcome Tony Blair into the Catholic Church.

Fr. Z. has some cogent remarks about this in consideration of Mr. Blairs past support for homosexuality and abortion.

At the same time, none of us are finished products yet. I suspect Mr. Blair or other politicians will not change his positions if they are constantly blasted with nastiness. Persuasion is needed. In no way does this condone public denial of Catholic doctrine. I am trying to underscore the fallen dimension of our human experience.

Thus, I am glad that Mr. Blair desired closer unity with the Catholic Church and acted on it. However, I would like some clarifications.

Hopefully we will get some clarifications on this. If he has not changed his positions that are contrary to Church teaching I would certainly like to know how the Cardinal would justify brining him into the Church at this time. As I have mentioned before in connection to this is that one of my favorite stories from Alice Von Hildebrand's book "Soul of a Lion" about her husband Dietrich is that when he was taking private instructions to come into the Church he announced to the priest that he was ready to enter the Church. The priest knowing Dietrich's opposition to the Church's teaching on contraception told him he would not bring him into the Church unto he accepted this. Dietrich then made an act of faith and said that he believes all that the Church teaches and then later became a great teaching on the truth of the evil of contraception.

None of us enter the Church perfected, though I would think that when we make the Profession at Faith when being received into the Church and saying that we believe all that she teaches that there should be a reasonable chance that we are telling the truth. To bring someone in that we knew to not hold all that the Church teaches would be to have them perjure themselves before God.

I sincerely hope that he has had a change of heart and if not that he will in the future.

Update: I see that Diogenes is on the same page as myself on this:

Tony Blair recants position on abortion!

Well he did, didn't he? And somehow I just missed the headline?

In order to be received into the Catholic Church, one must make a profession of faith, affirming that one believes all that the Church teaches. And the Church teaches that support for abortion is gravely wrong, and so now we know-- don't we?-- that Blair recognizes his past public stance was gravely wrong. Don't we?

Don't we?

Hello? Hello?

If true this is a pretty funny.

"Who is your favorite author?" Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.

Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.

In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.

"My favorite author is C. S. Lewis," she said.

Candidates do have strange answers at times to this question. Mitt Romney replied before that Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard was his favorite novel. On one level that answer makes a lot of sense since L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith have a lot in common in that both made up their own religions. But on a literary taste level Battlefield Earth was just a so-so SF novel that really needed an editor. Though if Mitt had replied that Battlefield Earth was his favorite movie I think that would have totally disqualified him from running for president. But Mitt seems to have flipped (what a surprise) on his literary choice since his Facebook entry lists a bunch of novels as his favorites and none of them were Battlefield Earth.

Mike Huckabee's Facebook page lists his favorite books as " The Holy Bible, To Kill a Mockingbird, Mere Christianity, and anything by Francis Schaeffer." So he really blew it with the seven year old and would have done much better mentioning Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

Sen. John McCain's favorite novel is "For Whom the Bell Tolls" which is also the theme for his campaign.

For Rudy Giuliani his selections "Testimony by Nicolas Sarkozy, Churchill, Their Finest Hour, Profiles in Courage, Lincoln, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life" seem like books he would ask someone to come up with to make him look smart. Can you trust a guy that can't list one piece of fiction other then his conservative credentials?

Neither Duncan Hunter or Ron Paul's Facebook page list any favorite books.

John C. Wright responding to a materialist.

...Let us assume you had the power, the Thought Control Helmet, to reorganize at will any brain you came across, so that the ideas in that brain would conform to whatever conclusions and ideas you preferred. The moment you use it, you are treating people like rocks: they would for all practical purposes be inert material, robots or animals, things without any moral or human meaning to you. If you used the Mind Helmet on Trilby to make her fall in love with you, it would have no more meaning to you than if you wrote a love letter to your self and forged her name on it. It would not represent any judgment or thought or honest emotion on her part. It would be fan-fiction, but one where you put yourself in as a character and get Uhura to kiss you.

You would never discuss or debate or disagree with anyone again. Instead of the frustration of trying to make your ideas clear to them in words, you could merely zap them with the helmet-ray, and their thoughts would be whatever you wished. You could perhaps as a game pretend these robot people were real, and let them say and think whatever nature had randomly written into their brain-mechanisms, but it would be you pretending they were human. It would not even be a game. It would be a pastime, like solitaire. Their words and ideas would have no truth value to you.

But no matter how you treated other people, you could not treat yourself the same way; you would not use your Mind Control Helmet to force yourself to think certain ideas, because the ideas would have no truth-value to you if you imposed them on yourself in that fashion. I am not saying the owner of such a machine might not want to lie to himself in his own thoughts, or bury an unhappy memory--but the utility of ideas qua ideas, the usefulness we seek from the process of reasoning, would be lost.

Ideas that are imposed on you by the helmet, if you knew they were imposed, would not persuade you that they were true. If you did not know they were imposed, but thought you had reasoned your way to their conclusion, you were merely be deceived and insane. You could no longer trust your own thoughts to be corresponding to reality. If you eliminated from yourself the desire to have trustworthy thoughts or to have them correspond to reality, or if you eliminate your awareness of what you had done to yourself, at that point you are a muppet.

The reason why materialism is self-contradictory is that you are in effect telling me that your thoughts are controlled by a Mind Control Helmet that runs without an operator, merely Mother Nature blinding sending out unintentional thought-control-signals. But, if you actually believed that, you would conclude that your thoughts have no truth value.

Whether John C. Wright is speaking on the Space Princess movement or materialism he is always fun to read and his recent series of posts responding to materialism are quite good.

A statement has been issued from the Diocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Charges about Father Leo Tibesar & St. Frances Cabrini Parish

Various bloggers and websites have reported that Father Leo Tibesar, of Saint Frances Cabrini Parish in Minneapolis announced his intention to bless same sex marriages. Those reports are not true. Father Tibesar has never blessed a same sex marriage nor does he intend to do so, which would be a violation of his priestly vows and state. He made this very clear in a public clarification issued by Saint Frances Cabrini’s parish council and following a meeting with Archbishop Harry J. Flynn.

During his meeting with Archbishop Flynn and Auxiliary Bishop Richard Pates, Father Tibesar also agreed to remove any language from the St. Frances Cabrini parish website that is in opposition to Roman Catholic Church doctrine and to refrain from statements in any form that are contrary to Church teaching. He confirmed these commitments to Archbishop Flynn in a letter following their meeting. Communications Office, Archdiocese of StP&M

I find the parsing of what they said to be a tad disingenuous.

Charges about Father Leo Tibesar & St. Frances Cabrini Parish Various bloggers and websites have reported that Father Leo Tibesar, of Saint Frances Cabrini Parish in Minneapolis announced his intention to bless same sex marriages. Those reports are not true.

Well what the parish website said on reconciliation with homosexuals.

"Publicly bless the relationships of a same sex couple after the couple completes a process of discernment similar to that completed by heterosexual couples before marriage;"

How is this not an intention to bless so-called same sex marriages? You could say that it certainly might be true that Fr. Tibesar did not say this. Though you might think he has some responsibility for what is written on his parish's website, especially something up their for a while. This page is now removed so certainly they knew what pages had to be removed.

For years Fr. Tibesar has been part of the Leo Tibesar pro-homosexual lobbying group dignity as part of their National Leadership Team. He was made pastor even after this. In July of 2007 he once again participated in Dignity's annual convention where one of the workshops said "We will discuss John Paul’s definition of marriage in his day and how it supports gay marriage today." From his homily last month:

Two people came into Church to pray, one was a Catholic Archbishop who refuses communion to Rainbow Sash people at the Cathedral on Pentecost Sunday who prayed " I give you thanks oh God that I am not like others – greedy, dishonest or like others who need to make their dissent from official Church teaching so public and divisive.

The other were Rainbow parents of GLBT people at the Cathedral on Pentecost who stood off on the side and prayed, "Oh God be merciful to us for failing to attend our own Churches more often; they say they love God then turn there backs on us in hate directly contrary to 1:John,4 – whoever loves God must also love the neighbor."

The Rainbow Sash Movement also supports same-sex marriages among other things totally against the truth of Catholic teaching. So I guess we are to believe that since he belongs to a pro-homosexual acts lobbying group that specifically supports so-called same-sex marriage, and his own parish's website does the same, and he supports a homosexual movement that does the same "that these reports are not true".

I know it is too much to expect that a diocese/bishop actually thank bloggers and others for bringing things to their attention. I am really glad that the Bishop has spoken to Fr. Tibesar and especially glad that Fr. Tibesar has agreed to remove those pages on his website and to refrain from making statements in opposition to Church teaching. Though I must wonder if "these reports are not true" why is the diocese asking him to refrain from making statements in opposition to Church teaching? Which is it.

I also wonder when they will ask St. Joan of Arc in the same diocese to remove all of their pages they have on their site in opposition to Church teaching?

Father Z comments on this story since he is originally from this diocese and has some good points about not taking delight in the misfortune of others, though I think within the Catholic blogosphere this has not been done in reference to this story.

I think though why this statement has fired me up is that the diocese was saying that what bloggers reported was not true. I looked through the less than 20 blogs that reported on this story and not one of them asserted that this priest was performing same-sex marriages. They posted on what the parish's website said, his involvement in dignity, and the contents of his homily last month. None of these facts are in contention and for them to say otherwise is less than the truth.

A reader sent me the following story:

The Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday that the Christmas story of the Three Wise Men was nothing but a 'legend'.

Dr Rowan Williams has claimed there was little evidence that the Magi even existed and there was certainly nothing to prove there were three of them or that they were kings. Archbishop says nativity 'a legend'

Dr Williams argued that the traditional Christmas story was nothing but a 'legend' He said the only reference to the wise men from the East was in Matthew's gospel and the details were very vague.

Dr Williams said: "Matthew's gospel says they are astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire, that's all we're really told. It works quite well as legend."

The Archbishop went on to dispel other details of the Christmas story, adding that there were probably no asses or oxen in the stable.

He argued that Christmas cards which showed the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus, flanked by shepherds and wise men, were misleading. As for the scenes that depicted snow falling in Bethlehem, the Archbishop said the chance of this was "very unlikely". advertisement

In a final blow to the traditional nativity story, Dr Williams concluded that Jesus was probably not born in December at all. He said: "Christmas was when it was because it fitted well with the winter festival."

Fr. Dwight Longenecker has some interesting comments about the Anglican Archbishop's comments.

Archbishop Rowan Williams has publicly debunked the traditional Nativity as 'legend'. Anyone who has read the New Testament in detail will know that the stuff of medieval paintings, crib scenes and Christmas cards include a good deal of non-Biblical 'embroidery'. However, one doesn't need to deconstruct all of that to somehow prove one's intellectual credentials.

The Archbishop presents himself as an intellectual Anglo Catholic, but all his recent comments do is prove his Protestant mindset. The liberal Protestant is essentially a critic. He is a critic of the Bible, a critic of tradition, a critic of traditional Christian morality, a critic of anything that is the received religion. The liberal Protestant feels obliged to pick it apart, reduce it to facts and submit the mysteries of the faith to human reason.

What interests me is that many of our conservative Evangelical friends want to distance themselves from the liberal intellectual reductionism of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but when it comes to Catholicism are they not just as critical, just as rational, just as reductionist as the ABC? In fact, Protestantism has in its very genetic code the same rationalism, reductionism, individualism and humanism which is exhibited by the Archbishop's comments--it's just that in Evangelicalism it comes to move 'conservative' conclusions.

It is certainly true as Fr. Longenecker said that there is a lot of non-Biblical 'embroidery' on the Nativity story, but really what has happened over time is that events have been compressed just as what often happens when a book is turned into a movie. What we have in Matthew is a mentioning of wise men who first visited Herod, later gave gifts to Jesus and then being warned in a dream left without seeing Herod first. The great Catholic apologist Frank Sheed argues in his book "To Know Christ Jesus" that they must have appeared after Mary's Presentation in the Temple since her and Joseph paid a poor mans sacrifice of "a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons" which they wouldn't have done if they already had the gifts given by the wise men.

So in reality the Christmas Card view of the Nativity doesn't fit reality and we just don't even know for sure the number of wise men. Though surely the traditional number of three wise men is because of the gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh along with the Trinitarian overtones. The ideas of them being Kings instead of astrologers though is surely an addition. But this type of reductionism would ruin great songs and who wants to sing "We undetermined number of wise men who are probably astrologers and not kings coming somewhere from the East though sometimes after Jesus' birth are,"

What is so silly and needless about the Archbishop's remarks is that surely he knows how his remarks will be portrayed and seen as not only casting doubt on aspects of the Nativity story, but also on the birth of Jesus. To make these remarks just before Christmas plays right into the media's hands. The BBC has the audio of the interview with the caption " Simon Mayo talks to the Archbishop of Canterbury and asks if he really believes that there's a Big Wizard who lives in the sky?"

Early in my blogging career another Church of England bishop concerned about the accuracy of the Nativity gave me the opportunity to pun away.

A Church of England bishop has attacked "sentimental" Christmas card portrayals of the Nativity, saying that Jesus's family were asylum seekers and the three Wise Men were part of an assassination plot.

The Bishop of Lichfield, the Rt Rev Keith Sutton, said the shepherds were not the lovable characters depicted in Nativity plays but were on "the fringes of society" and that, for most people, Christmas was a chore.

Did Herod the Great contract out a hit to three foreigners for plausible deniability? How did this assassination go awry? Did King herod say "Go and murder him" and they thought he said "Gold and myrrh to him"?, frankly that makes sense.

There is the old joke sometimes told by pastors of people calling them up and asking them what time Midnight Mass is. I guess thought that in parts of Britain the question is a valid one.

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Roman Catholic churches across Britain plan to stage midnight mass early on Christmas Eve to avoid drunk revelers on the loose after the pubs shut.

A survey by the Catholic weekly magazine The Tablet showed churches planned to hold mass as early as six in the evening to avoid running the risk of disturbance from drunks staggering out of the pub at the traditional closing time of 11 p.m.

"A lot of people, having been disgorged from the pub, were attracted to the light and music and used to disrupt proceedings," said Father James O'Keefe at St Bede's Church in the northeastern city of Newcastle.

In the Scottish city of Glasgow, Father Joseph McNulty said: "I wouldn't hold a Midnight Mass at midnight because of the drunks. There would be too much trouble."

In other Christmas news, Christmas is now a national holiday in Iraq. (Thanks to the reader that sent that in.)

First Things has a interesting post Looking for Mary in Christmas Carols By Michael Linton where he references just how few Christmas carols actually reference Mary. It is hard to imagine a Christmas Crèche without Mary, but I guess most carols written since the Protestant reformation have done so.

Though this is not just a Protestant divide and something that effects just carols. Think of all the modern hymns that have unfortunately become standards in so many Catholic churches. I can think of only one one: Hail Mary: Gentle Woman. While the lyrics are okay I find the melody to be rather droning and when compared to some of the magnificent hymns for Mary, it is severely lacking. Funny with all the talk about inclusive language in the liturgy there has been no outcry against the lack of Marian hymns at most modern Masses.

Greg and Jennifer of the Rosary Army have constantly entertained and informed me since they started their podcast. But I have to admit that they have exceeded themselves in their 200th show "Rosary Army: The Musical." A Podcast Opera with multiple songs detailing their life that would make Peter Townsend say "Wow!" I especially liked the song "What would Scott Hahn" do.

Rosary Army and SQPN are currently in a fund drive and you can now get the episodes of That Catholic Show on DVD.

Dawn Eden continues her series on international Planned Parenthood ads with items such as "Quality not Quantity" and "Two is better that too many."

Around this time of year we often hear about the "common knowledge" that the date of Christmas was in fact based on the date of a Pagan feast to do a sort of holiday one-upmanship. I have already heard this at least once this year during a television drama and often heard it from my Uncle as I was growing up.

Even in Catholic circles we often hear about Pagan holidays and practices being "baptized." Mostly we hear about this in regards to All Saints Day and Christmas. The facts are otherwise and what is not true about All Saints Day is also not true about the date of Christmas. Last year Mark Shea posted a section from his upcoming book on Mary.

Time was when I, like most people, took it for granted the winter solstice and, in particular, the Roman Feast of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun were simply pagan celebrations that hung around into Christian times. In fact, when I set out to write this book I still thought this. But I discovered the reality is far more complicated and interesting. Indeed, it turns out this widely assumed "fact" that "everybody knows" is probably another sample of pseudo-knowledge. For according to William Tighe, a church history specialist at Pennsylvania's Muhlenberg College, "the pagan festival of the 'Birth of the Unconquered Sun' instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the 'pagan origins of Christmas' is a myth without historical substance."

For the fact is, our records of a tradition associating Jesus' birth with December 25 are decades older than any records concerning a pagan feast on that day.

[T]he definitive "Handbook of Biblical Chronology" by professor Jack Finegan (Hendrickson, 1998 revised edition) cites an important reference in the "Chronicle" written by Hippolytus of Rome three decades before Aurelian launched his festival. Hippolytus said Jesus' birth "took place eight days before the kalends of January," that is, Dec. 25.

Tighe said there's evidence that as early as the second and third centuries, Christians sought to fix the birth date to help determine the time of Jesus' death and resurrection for the liturgical calendar—long before Christmas also became a festival.

Read the rest of his informative post to find out why originally the early Christians had determined that Dec 25th was the date of our Savior's birth.

NEW YORK - Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema have reached agreement to make J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit," a planned prequel to the blockbuster trilogy "The Lord of the Rings."

Jackson, who directed the "Rings" trilogy, will serve as executive producer for "The Hobbit." A director for the prequel films has yet to be named.

Relations between Jackson and New Line had soured after "Rings," despite a collective worldwide box office gross of nearly $3 billion — an enormous success. The two sides nevertheless were able to reconcile, with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) splitting "The Hobbit" 50/50, spokemen for both studios said Tuesday.

"I'm very pleased that we've been able to put our differences behind us, so that we may begin a new chapter with our old friends at New Line," Jackson said in a statement. "We are delighted to continue our journey through Middle Earth."

Two "Hobbit" films are scheduled to be shot simultaneously, similar to how the three "Lord of the Rings" films were made. Production is set to begin in 2009 with a released planned for 2010, with the sequel scheduled for a 2011 release.

I do hope that they are able to cast Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf once again. I have watched the LOTR trilogy of movies multiple times and each time I find just how amazing Ian McKellen's performance was and that his performance should have won him the Oscar for Best Supporting Oscar. His homosexual activism is annoying, but it doesn't spoil for me his pitch perfect portrayal of Gandalf or the excellent job he did as Magneto in X-Men.

Marcel LeJeune

St. Anthony Messenger (a publication normally of dubious value) has an interesting article on the background of the Christmas carol "Do You Hear What I Hear" and that it was actually written in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis by the same composers who wrote "Rain, Rain, Go Away."

With all of the blocking being done to Summorum Pontificum being done by certain bishops we could only wish they could find this same zeal for other projects. What if these bishops were as effective in blocking the will of the Holy Father and in reality also the previous Holy Father in regards to the TLM as they were to closing down abortion clinics in their diocese?

What if they showed the same concern towards knowing the rubrics of the TLM as they did to the ordinary rite? Is it any wonder some take with more than a grain of salt these new found worries that priests more than adequately know the Mass and to perform it correctly. Now certainly the bishop has a clear role in ensuring his priests have the proper training and that they conform to liturgical regulations, but why exactly is it that there seems to be a rigorist view of this towards the TLM and a Lassie Faire attitude towards the ordinary form of the Mass. Strangely I had the odd idea that the same view should be taken towards all forms of liturgy in the diocese, but maybe that's just me.

For the last several years Planned Parenthood has been selling their "Choice on Earth" Holiday cards and the ones to the left are this years products. This is one occasion where I am totally fine with them using holiday cards vice Christmas cards.

The images used on their cards once again give absolutely no indication of the reality of "choice". Two images are of a mother with a child, yet Planned Parenthood offers zero services for those who want to keep their child.

Mark Steyn wrote quite accurately recently "What's the "pro-choice" line? "Every child should be wanted"? Not anymore. The progressive position has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted." But in some ways for PP every child is a wanted child, at least wanted by their abortionists so that they might get their bounty. But this view towards families is not just a recent development, but one with a steady message since at least the seventies. Anybody with a large family can attest to the questions they get about them being "all theirs" and the glances turned their way for making a societal faux pas. Though I once had the same attitude in my enlightened liberal days.

Considering the recent news of environmental activists saying having a child is selfish and damaging to the environment and the recent books as Mark Steyn notes such as ""Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence." Planned Parenthood and radical environmentalist are natural allies except the part about the pill damaging the ecosystem with hormones. But Planned Parenthood and radical environmentalist have always had their convenient blind spots when it suits their purposes.

The card with the doves though is obviously the most annoying. Whether the dove is seen as a symbol for the Holy Spirit or as a symbol for peace it is still inappropriate. Blessed Mother Teresa said "I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion"

But I guess the reality of babies ripped apart and removed by suction is not the best image even for a "holiday card." Even contraception doesn't lend itself to the comfy holiday image they are trying to portray. A tree decked out with condoms and pill packages just doesn't hit it out of the park.

Though the question is exactly what holiday are these cards for in the first place? Christmas with the celebration of the birth of our savior is obviously not it. They see a pregnant young mother as a target and not something to rejoice in. The miracle related during Hanukkah with the traditional Jews defeating secularist Jews when Judaism had been outlawed by Antiochus IV Epiphanes does not really fit into a holiday they would be happy about. The made-up of holiday of Kwanzaa doesn't fit the bill considering the historic roots of Planned Parenthood and their view on blacks that extends to the present day with a concentration of their clinics being in poorer black neighborhoods. Well how about the secular holiday of Christmas where the overriding message is "Family is important." Somehow abortion and contraception is not really family friendly. If only they would start making those dime-a-dozen holiday TV movies with the message "Preventing family is important" then PP would have a match.

In years past I have responded with Planned Parenthood cards of my own since I am always willing to help get out the real message of Planned Barrenhood.

2003

2005

So I guess I will continue this bi-annual holiday tradition.

Dawn Eden orignally sent me a link to PP's latest message.

Planned Parenthood supporters, as I reflect upon the past year and consider the next, I can't help but feel a sense of good will. Good will toward the women, men, and families that we serve. Good will toward you, my Planned Parenthood family. And good, determined will to accomplish the work that lies ahead in the new year.

Well I agree that they have work that lies ahead - "lies ahead" is pretty much a forecast of their business model.

Mother Teresa: In the Shadow of Our Lady is a new book by Fr. Joseph Langford, MC who was a co-founder of the priests community for the Missionaries of Charity. This book put out by Our Sunday Visitor concentrates on Blessed Mother Teresa's devotion to our Blessed Mother. I had never thought much about Mother Teresa in connection with our Blessed Mother other than to think like pretty much all saints that she would have had a fervent devotion to Our Lady. This book goes in depth just how fervent that devotion was and just how much it informed her life and prayer life.

She is of course well known for always carrying a Rosary with her that were often in her hands. For her this was no mere accessory as part of her habit, but evidence of her close connection with Our Lady. She was once asked way she always carried a Rosary in her hand even when it was obvious she was not praying it at time. She responded that it reminds her that she is holding the Our Lady's hand. The term "Our Lady" is what she predominately and simply referred to Mary as. The book describes the vision she had on the train to Darjeeling in 1947 when she first received her "call within a call" to serve the poorest of the poor. Subsequently in 1947 she had a series of vision in three parts that in the visions of Jesus, with Mary at his side, in a crowd of the poor where the poor were reaching out to him. In the third of these visions Mary reached out and supported Mother Teresa and held her outstretched hand reaching out towards Jesus. These visions encapsulated her call and how she lived her life in the fifty years that she lived in the slums of Calcutta.

Fr. Langford throughout the book goes deeper into what Mother Teresa lived and taught those around her about the Blessed Mother. Providentially I came upon the chapter of Mother Teresa devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe on the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Mother Teresa identified with Saint Juan Diego in his humility and simplicity and to do whatever Our Lady asked him to to. An appendix in the book contains the Nican Mophoua which was originally written in Aztec and relates the story of Juan Diego that was first published in 1649.

I also thought that Father Langford did an excellent job in describing Mother Teresa's spiritual darkness and her great faith that was carved out and deepened by the dark night of the soul.

This is just a wonderful and beautiful book on multiple levels as you read about Blessed Mother Teresa and how she so imaged the Blessed Mother in her life by holding herself within the Immaculate Heart of Mary. There is quite a lot of spiritual nourishment that can be gained by reading this short book of around 114 pages. The book is also quite beautiful on a physical level also. I enjoyed how color was used in the book. A nice Marian blue is used in chapter and subchapter titles along with a page on the Marian Covenant that refers to her duties and our duties. The first page of the book contains a representation of a painting of Mother Teresa's vision in 1947 that is displayed in the house of the Missionary of Charity Fathers in Mexico City along with a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the last page of the book.

Rome (Agenzia Fides) - Although there has been no change in the law on interruption of pregnancy, since the fall of Communism the number of abortions in Croatia has dropped by 88,5% (2005). Fruit of the local Catholic Church's efforts to educate and form.

Coming in 2008 from ICONOCLAST Pictures, Inc.

The Copper Dredil

Long ago, in a place far away from political correctness, there was a land, a prophecy, a villian and a hero. Critics rave about the upcoming film for its bold, daring and provocative attempt to insult two of the three major monotheistic religions. Since Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, have already been dissed, trashed and ridiculed by Hollywood seventy times seventy times, the tables have now been turned. Ron Boward produces and directs this innovative cinematic masterpiece intended to even the score once and for all.

Synopsis � an ancient prophecy predicts that the thousand year reign of evil tyranny will end only when the magic Copper Dredil is returned to its proper place. Before that can happen, however, it must be rescued from the clutches of the malevolent Synagogue of Zeon, a super-secret society of fanatical fundamentalists who claim the only true magic comes from the Book of Spells. They are always at war, however, with a competing faction, the Mosque of Mira whose adherents reject anything and everything in the Book of Spells. They maintain the only true and valid incantations are the ones not written down but are spontaneously created by the individual wizard. The Mosque of Mira has declared a Jihad on the Synagogue of Zeon. There can be no victory until one side is no more.

Meanwhile, while the forces of darkness battle each other for control of the world, a small group of rebels known as the Sacerdotes, led by the wise and aged Pontifex Maximus, seek to fulfill the prophecy given millennia ago. Visitors from another world came in peace to share their knowledge: scientific, philosophic and theological. They only wore scarlet red clothing and were called by the natives, �Cardinals.� The Cardinals had no agenda and no ulterior motives. That was not the case with their enemies, however.

Cardinals insisted on worshipping their deity facing East and in an old, archaic language only spoken in their temples. They also wear elaborate costumes when they worship.

The biggest obstacle, however is that the Cardinals refuse to dilute their teaching which is as much moral as it is religious. An alliance between the Cantors (local authorites from the Synagogue) and the Imams (secret police from the Mosque) occurs when it is learned that the Cardinals have something which promises eternal life.

Before the mysterious element is discovered, however, war breaks out and all the Cardinals are killed, save one. Catzinger lives long enough to prophesize that a hero will find the Copper Dredil which has the power to render enemies powerless and thus enable the quest for the Missal, the special book that allows the Priest to make present the source of eternal life.

Until that day arrives, the mysterious artifact lays hidden and protected in a Basilica by an order of Knights called the Krewsaydurs. Hildebrand, our hero, leaves the safety of the monastery to seek the Copper Dredil and free his people from slavery once and for all. He is accompanied by Zozimus, the sacristan; Jerome, the lector; Edmund, the extern; and Sylvester, the Acolyte. Together, they form a brotherhood sworn to return proper worship back to their temple. Forbdidden for centuries, the ancient language of their forefathers is still secretly used by our champions. VERITAS VINCIT (truth conquers) is the motto of this coalition for victory.

But it is only fiction, so why should anyone be offended???

From Fr. John Trigilio's blog The Black Biretta.

I recently finished Archbishop Fulton Sheen's St. Therese - A Treasured Love Story which contains a group of sermons by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheed centering on the life of St. Therese. These were preached on the one-hundreth anniversary of St. Therese birth in 1973. The book calls them novena talks, but there are eleven of these talks that were preached at church in Dublin, Ireland after an invitation from Fr. Linus Ryan, O. Carm.

Being a lover of all things Carmelite and having read extensively on St. Therese I was not sure what to expect from the Archbishop Sheen on the subject of this great saint. I am also quite a fan of the good Archbishop, his books, and his wonderful television series and so I expected that it would be an enjoyable read. I had not know that Archbishop Sheen himself was a Third Order Carmelite and how much of a devotee he was to St. Therese.

The book starts with a short introduction and then short biographies first of St. Therese and then Archbishop Sheen. This foreword and the book has been put together by Fr. Andrew Apostoli, CFR who is the Vice Postulator of Archbishop Sheen's cause. The middle of the book has several pages both of St. Therese and of Archbishop Sheen and even includes a picture of a young Fr. Apostoli with the Archbishop.

Even though I have read several of his books I don't think I have ever read any of his talks and this book shows that I have missed out by not doing so. All I can really say is wow, what a powerful preacher he is. He has the ability to teach you what you might already know or be familiar with as if it was something brand new causing you to see it fresh. Each talk is centered around a topic such as mercy, suffering, humility, intercession, fighting the Devil, etc. The talks are full of personal anecdotes and stories to illustrate the topic along with as you expect much from the writings of St. Therese. I also found it interesting some of the comments he made about the trends in modern theology and religious life of which he was definitely not a fan. Regardless of what he is talking about though he does it with great humor while at the same time driving the points home.

This is a highly worthwhile book for fans of either Therese or Archbishop Sheen. The official site for the cause of the canonization of Servant of God Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen is selling these books to support his cause.

Another book I recently read was Mystics, Mavericks & Miracle Workers: A 30-Day Journey with Some Saints by Jason Chatraw and Eric Sandras. I though it might be interesting since it was a 30-day devotional that bases it self around the writings of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. John of the Cross, St. and St. Ambrose of Milan. For each saint there are five chapters each representing a days spiritual reading that starts with a short bio on the saint and then something from their writings, a Biblical quote, three or four other quotes and then a reflection from one of the two authors and finally a couple of questions for the reader.

The first quote used after the reading from St. Bernard of Clairvaux was from the Oracle to Neo from the movie The Matrix. Now I thought that was rather cool and the quote did fit in with the topic, but the book goes down rapidly after that. The sections I referenced earlier were divided into Saint ??? thoughts, God's thoughts, thoughts of others, Dr. E or Jason's thoughts, and finally your thoughts. I thought this was a little cutsey, but a minor criticism. Where the book falls apart is mainly in the reflections by the two authors. Both authors are Protestants with one being a pastor and the other a freelance writer and small groups pastor. But I figured a book willing to seriously take on some of these great saints especially one as deep as St. John of the Cross would be able to provide some thoughts to help to amplify and understand what was meant by these saints in their writings.

I must be spoiled by some of the great spiritual reading I have done and the level of spiritual insights others have on the lives of the saints. My pastor Fr. Leon can speak on St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross as if he knew them in life and is so familiar with their writings and has such a deep prayer life that he can help you to dive deeper into their writings. The effort of these two authors while not horrible is just not up to the level one might expect on a book to guide you on a journey with as the book say "some" saints. Their thoughts are full of references to their gas-guzzling SUVs, Starbucks, MacDonalds, and other references to modern society. While certainly it sometimes is quite useful to use examples from every day life to help us better understand a subject, I didn't often find that these example were helpful. The reflections on the saints covered by Jason Chatraw were better in quality to the other other, but just not ready for prime time. In a chapter after St. John of the Cross is talking about the night of the senses and the ways of purgation we get the example of the author being told by his realtor to get a pressure-washer to clean his driveway in order to sell his house. Maybe not the worst comparison, but it just seems so mundane after reading St. John of the Cross's words.

Event the scripture interpretation used under God's Words annoyed me. Through parts of the book they used a translation called The Message that is one of those laughably bad modern translations that translate things such as "There is a time to shut up and a time to speak up" and has Saint Paul talking about "cheap sex, a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage.." I think it is the same thing that annoys me both about The Message translation and the reflections in this book and the attempt to be excessively modern and hip. I got the feel of fast-food reflections and not the nutritious spiritual reading I am use to. Not to say this is a horrible book, but with all the great spiritual reading available in the same 30-day devotional format it just isn't in their league.

Now it is interesting that two Protestant pastors have written this book that is so centered around Catholic saints and includes multiple quotes from other Catholic Saints and people like Blessed Mother Teresa. The authors have pretty much a Catholic view of salvation at least as it regards it being a process and if it introduces Protestants to the writings of these great saints then I say good on them, but Catholics and others already familiar with the spiritual treasury of the Church should pass.

With the recent comment by Mike Huckabee on asking whether Mormon's believe that Satan is Jesus' brother, Andrew Sullivan tries to explain how odd Catholic teachings are anyway.

As a Catholic, I am obliged to believe that the mother of Jesus was whooshed physically into the sky rather than dying.

Once again Mr. Sullivan shows his ignorance about the faith. The dogma of the Assumption is relates to the bodily Assumption into heaven of Mary. There has been no statement by the Magisterium as to whether Mary was alive when she was assumed or whether she died first. Eastern Catholic/Orthodox theology generally sides on her having died first and celebrate the Dormition (falling asleep) of Mary. Of course Mr. Sullivan is being facetious with the whole "whooshed physically into the sky" part.

Though I bet most faithful Catholic wouldn't be embarrassed to have someone bring up the Assumption in contrast to the Satan is Jesus' brother teaching in Mormonism.

Via anti-contraception news.

Much like Al Gore's claim that he invented the internet, Hillary is taking credit for the reduction in teen pregnancy rates between 1995 and 2005.

"To address this important issue, my husband issued a call to action in 1995 to America's parents and leaders to join together to cut America's teen pregnancy rate by one-third over a decade. In order to help achieve this ambitious goal, I helped launch the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, and we successfully achieved a one-third reduction by 2005"

Never mind that during this period, abstinence among teens was on the rise and state restrictions on abortions were given new strength by the Supreme Court's 1992 *Planned Parenthood vs. Casey* decision. For example, a study by professor Michael New of the University of Alabama found that pro-life legislation, and not the influence of Bill or Hillary Clinton, resulted in significant reductions on the abortion rate among
minors.

And never mind that the partial birth abortion ban, which Hillary opposed and voted against, may have significantly changed public perception on abortion and its acceptability.

Yes, folks, Hillary Clinton wants us to believe that increased abstinence and pro-life legislation did not have an impact on teen pregnancy and abortion rates. And of course, she blames the recent rise in teen birth
rates on the Bush administration:

"But the report released today indicates that under President Bush's leadership, we may be falling off track"

So let's get this straight - Hillary caused teen pregnancy rates to drop by 1/3 over the span of a decade, George Bush is responsible for the recent rise in teen birth rates, Bill Clinton did not have sex with "that woman",
and Al Gore invented the internet. Given these facts, how could anybody doubt that putting Hillary in the Oval office will once and for all end teen pregnancy?

Since there are now so many conservative who now say that waterboarding is not torture and that it is effective and just another "enhanced" interrogation technique, I think we should take it to the next level. Just think of all the money we can save if we brought waterboarding to our local police precincts. We could get confessions in murder cases in no time and help to improve the wait time in the court system while at the same time saving taxpayers money on lengthy and costly murder trials. Though why constrain it to just murder cases since it is only an enhanced interrogation technique. Martha Stewart would have copped to insider training in no time. In fact we could have members of the administration when they testify to congress be waterboarded just to be sure of the truth of what they are testifying to. After all the ends now justifies the means so lets get with the program and bring simulated drowning in a controlled environment to a neighborhood to you. If it's good enough for the Khmer Rouge it's good enough for us.

(CNSNews.com) - In a Dec. 1 op-ed in the Washington Post, First Lady Laura Bush said Americans need to "practice safe sex," use condoms "every time," and get tested for HIV/AIDS. Her spokeswoman repeated the message to Cybercast News Service this week. However, it is a message that is contrary to the Bush administration's policy position on abstinence education as the best way to fight HIV/AIDS.

In her commentary, "Let's Unite Against HIV-AIDS,"

Mrs. Bush wrote that Americans "should know our HIV status" and provided the Web site to find "the testing center closest to you." She went on to write: "Practice Safe Sex. Let's take a cue from our African counterparts and follow the ABC method of prevention: Abstinence, Be Faithful and the Correct and Consistent Use of Condoms. That means not just occasionally, but every time."

To the First Lady's message just say no. Though I would ask of her if you are abstinent or faithful why would you need to wear a condom every time? But I guess it is perfectly consistent within Church teaching for abstinent people to wear condoms. Heck anybody can wear a condom if they want - just not while having sex.

Now if I was going to write parody names for workshops I might create ones such as:

• Getting Beyond Dominating Hierarchy: Recovering an Authentic Vision of Teaching Authority in the Church ...
• Getting Beyond the Church as an 'Unequal Society': Uncovering Vatican II's Vision of the Church ...
• Getting Beyond 'Pay, Pray and Obey': Reflections on the Vocation of the Laity.

Unfortunately those are real workshops that will be held in the Diocese of Rochester - the diocese that even makes Cardinal Mahony and his diocese look orthodox by comparison.

These workshops will be held by Dr. Richard R. Gaillardetz. The Bishop's marriage site recommended one of his books last month. Though the book review has now been pulled. Since the USCCB also recently yanked the Golden Compass review I think it can be explained by "Nobody expects the Vanish Inquisition."

Rich Leonardi who posted on this originally also has a copy of the invitation for this workshop at his blog.

SANTIAGO, Chile -- A judge in southern Chile has sentenced a Catholic priest to recite seven psalms daily during three months as punishment for illegal parking. Judge Manuel Perez said he issued the unusual sentence after the Rev. Jose Cornejo said he could not afford the $100 fine that would have been the regular sanction for illegal parking in the city of Puerto Montt.

"He will have to recite seven psalms," Judge Perez told the Santiago daily La Tercera.

"This is not a sentence that just occurred to me," he added. "I did it as a tribute to Galileo Galilei, one of the greatest scientists of all time, who received a similar sentence from the Catholic Church during three years for saying the Earth rotates around the sun."

The judge ordered a court official who lives near the priest to check daily that the sentence was being fulfilled. The priest said he had parked his car in front of a school where he works because he lacked the money to pay for public parking.

Though in Galileo's case the Holy Office had him recite seven penitential psalms on three consecutive Sundays and it was his eldest daughter Celestine who said them for him. So if their has been such an outcry over Galileo's sentence shouldn't this sentence be seen as much more severe over a parking ticket? This judge obviously has an ax to grind and the idea of an official being sent daily to verify the psalm sentencing is pretty over the top. Would this official bring with him an official psalm counter that he click off after each recitation?

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my parking transgressions.
Wash away all my traffic record and cleanse me from my violations.
For I know my publicly available record, and my driving points are always before me.
Against you, and the DMV, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement.

His remarks will be made in his annual message for World Peace Day on January 1, but they were released as delegates from all over the world convened on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali for UN climate change talks.

This is from an article from The Daily Mail titled "The Pope condemns the climate change prophets of doom." More proof that you should never just rely on the media whether it is on the left or the right. The author of the article came up with his interpretation based on this piece from the Pope's message.

It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.

The author Simon Caldwell makes the Pope say much more then he actually said. Saying that the Pope was calling this scare-mongering is a reach , though it is obvious that the Pope sees the current discussion on the environment to be partially driven by ideological pressure and perhaps jumping the gun on the science. While I agree with Simon Caldwell about their being prophets of doom in the debate on "climate change", I think it is dishonest to put those words in the Pope's mouth.

The Holy Fathers message for the World Day of Peace called The Human Family, a Community of Peace is a good read just as everything he writes is. His message starts off and is rooted in the family.

The natural family, as an intimate communion of life and love, based on marriage between a man and a woman, constitutes “the primary place of ‘humanization' for the person and society”, and a “cradle of life and love”. The family is therefore rightly defined as the first natural society, “a divine institution that stands at the foundation of life of the human person as the prototype of every social order”

The message proceeds from the family to the human community where he addresses the environment. He then goes on to talk about economy in the context of human community and moral values and ends with overcoming conflict in the world and moving towards disarmament.

Dawn Eden has found more Planned Parenthood posters from around the world.

Since today is the Feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe I think it is a good time to remind people about some of the myths involved with this miraculous image, and yes I do believe this is a miraculous image.

As Catholics we are quite use to unhistorical elements developing in the stories of the saints, especially of the early saints. Though this is something that still happens. Over the years I have compiled some interesting facts that Catholic historian Sandra Miesel has written about some of these items that have developed around the story and image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The following are from what she has written in the past.

1. Our Lady of Guadalupe’s appearance to Juan Diego in 1531 did not halt Aztec human sacrifices. Those had already been stopped by the Spanish capture of Mexico City, more than a decade previously.
   
2. Today is the date of the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe which prompts me to vent some pet peeves concerning this apparition. First, Our Lady is not, not, not dressed like "an Aztec princess." The Aztecs wore calf-length wrap skirts and loose sleeveless blouses, no veils. The Guadalupana's garments are those of a typical late medieval Marian image. Rose and blue were favorite colors. Nor is her apparent pregnancy unique. Pregnant Madonnas used to be quite popular in the Middle Ages until Trent decided they were in poor taste. (Some had see-though bodies or fetal Infants who could be taken in and out.)

   Next, the sun, moon, stars, and angel were painted by human hands at some point in the 16th C. They are discoloring and flaking as was seen up close when the tilma was removed from its case for scientific examination in the 1980s. These features bring Mary's iconography in line with medieval Immaculate Conceptions or Assumptions. She used to wear a silly little crown, too, but that was removed in the 1890s.

3. A recent academic study of the history of devotion to the Guadalupana is MEXICAN PHOENIX by DA Brading (Cambridge, 2001). One surpise there is that the earliest record of the apparition refers to a variety of flowers, not just roses.

Can you imagine even thinking of painting on a miraculous image? How could anybody have thought that was a good idea at the time. Surely some artists have giant egos and you must have a pretty good sized one to decide to "improve upon" a miraculous image.

InsideCatholic.com begins a four day, four part written debate on the question, “Does the War in Iraq Meet the Qualifications of a Just War?” Today Robert R. Reilly give the affirmative position and tomorrow Russell Shaw gives the negative position.

As my readers might know I am in know way certain that the Iraq war was justified under just war criteria. Though I am sympathetic to Reilly's contention that it was a continuation of the first Gulf War due to repeated and constant violations of the treaty from the first war. It would seem to me that our reaction to the invasion of Kuwait to have easily be defendable under just war theory. I will be interested to see Russell Shaw column tomorrow since he is certainly a person whose opinion I respect. There are many people on both sides of this question that I do deeply respect.

I recently read Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action by the Pope's biographer George Weigel which will go on sale on Dec 26 of this year. George Weigel is certainly in the camp of those who think the Iraq War is just, but this book is not about the defense of this. Just war theory is hardly brought up and the discussion on Iraq and is mainly focused on just how badly the administration messed up post-war planning, that is if they had any real planning to deal with the situation in the first place.

There is good reason that George Weigel throughout the book refers to the Pope's Regensburg address that caused so much controversy, but for the wrong reasons. The Pope's address is almost a blueprint for this book and Weigel's contention that Jihadism is primarily caused by bad theology due to false idea that God is not even bound to reason. The Pope's critique was also focused on the Western world where there has been a loss of faith in reason and the ability to know what is true resulting in a deep and blinding skepticism.

Reading this book really helped me to focus and think about the problems of global Jihadism and how best to respond to it. In the West the idea of Jihad terrorism is mainly seen as a problem due to root causes such as poverty and other environmental factors. It is easy to understand this worldview since it results from a worldview that already does not take theology seriously in the first place. They can't see that other might take theology (no matter how badly distorted) seriously.

George Weigel lays out many factors in the Islamic culture that leads to Jihadism in the first part of the book called "Understanding the enemy." These factors are not going to be solved by reducing poverty in parts of the Middle East or by retreating back to our borders and having a foreign policy that just looks on at the rest of the world. I always found it rather silly to think that it was America helping out Muslims in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Somalia, etc as being a major rallying call against the United States. Israel is a bone of contention, but it is not just the U.S. that is supporting Israel. It is the view that Islam cannot fail and see history through this lens. The sections of Weigel's book are divided as lessons and the title of one lesson is "Jihadists read history and politics through their prism of their distinctive theological convictions, not through the lens of western assumptions of the progressive dynamic of history." Islamists see the stagnation of their culture and look for who to blame for it. The number of patents coming from predominantly Islamic cultures is so small that it hardly registers compared to countries like the United States, and in Asia and Europe. Part of the Islamist's critique of the Western world and its decadence is certainly true, but there response is even more evil than what they are suppose to be offended at. This produces the ironies such as the 9/11 hijackers visiting strip clubs before their attack on America for its decadence. Introspection just does not seem to be a part of much of the Islamic culture since it's Golden Age and decision to shut down philosophers who were contradicting it.

The second main part of the book deals with "Rethinking Realism" and why this is so important to the war against Jihad. The problems we faced in Iraq after major combat was over shows just how bad the problem is when we don't see the world as it is. In many ways this has always been a problem when we don't seriously label things as to what they are. President Reagan was attacked in the media and around the world when he called the U.S.S.R an "Evil Empire." Here was an actual case of speaking "truth to power" and people didn't like it because it identified a reality that just couldn't be brushed under the rug. Again a Chapter title sums this up well "Genuine realism in foreign policy takes wickedness seriously, yet avoids premature closure in its thinking about possibilities of positive change in world politics."

The third and final sections entails "Deserving Victory" which addresses cultural self-confidence, the false idea of tolerance, changing our energy policy to help defund Jihadism, and that there is no escape from U.S. leadership. Whoever become our next president is going to have to deal with these problems, yet I don't have much confidence that whoever it is much good will be done in these directions. A serious energy policy is quite unlikely in a partisan climate that has become so heated on this subject.

Weigel's Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action is a serious overview of the problem of Jihadism and what can be done about it and I would seriously recommend it to anyone who wants to read on the topic.

Today the U.S. bishops withdrew the review of the film “The Golden Compass,” which opened in theaters in the United States Dec. 7. The review was written by Harry Forbes and John Mulderig, the director and staff reviewer respectively of the Office for Film and Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The review was released and posted on the CNS Web site Nov. 29. The USCCB gave no reason for withdrawing the review.

Now they just need to redraw the Office for Film and Broadcasting itself.

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- A Vietnamese-American theologian's 2004 book on religious pluralism contains "pervading ambiguities and equivocations that could easily confuse or mislead the faithful," the U.S. bishops' Committee on Doctrine said in a Dec. 10 statement. Father Peter C. Phan's "Being Religious Interreligiously: Asian Perspectives on Interfaith Dialogue," published by Orbis Books, also contains "statements that, unless properly clarified, are not in accord with Catholic teaching," the committee said.

In its 15-page statement, the committee said it undertook an evaluation of "Being Religious Interreligiously" at the request of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and "invited Father Phan to respond" to questions.

"Since Father Phan did not provide the needed clarifications, and since the ambiguities in the book concern matters that are central to the faith, the Committee on Doctrine decided to issue a statement that would both identify problematic aspects of the book and provide a positive restatement of Catholic teaching on the relevant points," the statement said.

The statement was signed by Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., chairman of the Committee on Doctrine, and the six other committee members.

Father Phan, a former Salesian and now a priest of the Dallas Diocese, holds the Ellacuria chair of Catholic social thought in the theology department at Jesuit-run Georgetown University in Washington.

The statement on "clarifications required" in Father Phan's book cited three areas of concern:

-- Christ's role as "the unique and universal savior of all humankind."

-- The "salvific significance of non-Christian religions."

-- The Catholic Church as "the unique and universal instrument of salvation."

Quoting frequently from the book, the documents of the Second Vatican Council and "Dominus Iesus," the 2000 declaration of the Vatican doctrinal congregation on the "unicity and salvific universality of Jesus Christ and the church," the committee said Father Phan's book "could leave readers in considerable confusion as to the proper understanding of the uniqueness of Christ."

Although "the uniqueness of Jesus Christ is affirmed at some points" in the book, it is presented at other times as "not exclusive or absolute," the committee said.

Father Phan says in the book that the terms "unique," "absolute" and "universal" in relation to Jesus' role as savior "have outlived their usefulness and should be jettisoned and replaced by other, theologically more adequate equivalents."

It is rather interesting that he has decided not to defend himself to either the USCCB or the CDF. His defenders say that his works can be understood in a manner perfectly consistent with the faith and if this was true you would think that he could show his critics how this is true.

But it is pretty hard for statements from his book such as the following can be justified.

Religious pluralism . . . is not just a matter of fact but also a matter of principle. That is, non-Christian religions may be seen as part of the plan of divine providence and endowed with a particular role in the history of salvation. They are not merely a "preparation" for, " stepping stones" toward, or "seeds" of Christianity and destined to be "fulfilled" by it. Rather, they have their own autonomy and their proper roles as ways of salvation, at least for their adherents.

The statement from the USCCB says in response to this concept.

The book reasons that if in fact God has positively willed the existence of the non-Christian religions as ways of salvation, then the very goal itself of universal conversion to Christianity is misguided. "Indeed, if religious pluralism belongs to divine providence and is not just the fruit of human sinfulness, then it may not and must not be abolished by converting all the followers of non-Christian religions, at least during our common journey in history.”

But will this statement signed by several bishops included his own have any effect on his employment status at Georgetown?

In reference to my Imagine post about an atheist group's "Imagine No Religion" display with a picture of the Twin Towers John Gibson sent me this graphic he created.

a

Now as to whether Hitler was an atheist I would consider debatable. The case can be certain made for his being influenced by occult racist theories developed by Theosophy and mixed with German Paganism.

But the others pictured were all avowed atheists. Atheist apologists like to bring up the fact that Stalin once went to seminary as if this set the stage for the massacres, purges, and famines and killing enough people to make Hitler look tame by contrast. Stalin though went to seminary not because he felt he had a priestly vocation, but because of the lack of locally available university education.

The question I would have for atheists is why should Stalin have changed any aspect of his life? He lived to be a 74 in a life of luxury where he was able to dictate to others to give him whatever he wanted. If this life is all there is then why not take everything by force if you are able? A lot of atheist morality is tied to the idea that you accept a framework of socially developed morality to help you get along in life. That these socially developed moralities are culturally dependent and thus can change. That morality is totally subjective. So why should Stalin have followed these subjective moralities when he became top dog despite them. He didn't "go along to get along" which is what culturally developed morality is all about. From Stalin's subjective view he saw that what he did worked and in a material only world there are only material pleasures which he had a plenty.

I had also found it interesting that the atheist group wanted to tie it's message to 9/11. At first glance you might think this makes a kind of sense since you would think that suicide bombers are going to be motivated by religious thought to be willing to die for a cause. Though the truth is that atheists are also quite willing to kill themselves in suicide attacks. Just look at the cases of the Columbine killers, the shooter responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre, and pretty much everybody behind school shootings. Instead of dying for bad theology these killers seemed mostly to be willing to die for publicity.

But when you believe there is really no law outside yourself besides what you willingly shackle yourself with to go through life it is not surprising that this can lead to a view where human life is cheapened. Morality at this level is a consequence management view of morality. It is not about absolute rights or wrongs, but if I do this am I willing to accept probable consequences for a given action. During my conversion I started to realize that my own high moral view was built on a foundation of straw and could not backed up by a materialistic world view. I took a lot for granted that was actually borrowed from religious thought such as the idea of personhood and absolutes when it came to morality.

Atheists display a picture of the Twin Towers on a sign that say "Imagine no Religion"

VERNON - The sturdy white sign in Rockville’s Central Park asking passers-by to "Imagine No Religion" has generated some calls, a few of them angry, to town hall. There have also been calls to local clergymen and discussion in businesses along Rockville’s West Main Street.

The sign — some call it a billboard — was erected on Dec. 1 by the Connecticut Valley Atheists, and as of Thursday was the only display erected in the town’s center to mark the holiday season, aside from a Christmas tree just across from the town hall and some garland and white lights wrapped around light poles.

Yes why can't religious people act more like Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, and the other enlightened atheist leaders of the last century. How thankful we are for the start of the French Enlightenment which was called the Reign of Terror for some odd reason.

I think their sign would be better with the caption "Imagine no bad theology" since that is mostly what the problem is for Jihadists in the first place.

Through my sources I caught wind of a secretive commission working for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The commission is not listed on the Vatican's website, but I have word that it is called the "International Commission for Anti-Catholic Movie Sabotage." With the recent slew of specifically anti-Catholic movies I can see how this might come under the domain of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith instead of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications which might normally handle this topic.

I can see why this new commission is rather secretive and I hope I am not undermining their mission by letting the cat out of the bag. What the International Commission for Anti-Catholic Movie Sabotage is doing is quite remarkable and it looks like quite effective. One of their main focuses has been infiltration into the making of movies based on anti-Catholic novels, especially as screenwriters. These Vatican trained screenwriters specialize in didactic long-winded scripts that are low on action. These writers have been culled from Bishop's conferences throughout the world who are especially skilled at writing long documents that don't say a lot.

People are foolish enough to believe that the Vatican might employ albino monk assassins, but the Vatican is not below blockbuster script assassins. These screenwriters excel at writing lots and lots of dialog with plenty of references from the books plot in such a fast paced way that it is difficult for anybody not reading the original books to have any idea what is currently going on. They are also really good at explaining to the director and producers why lots of talking and limited action scenes is really a good idea for a blockbuster.

This technique worked really well for the International Commission for Anti-Catholic Movie Sabotage first attempt being The DaVinci Code and so far based on reviews of The Golden Compass it looks like they have succeeded in another long-winded screenplay. Even the secular movie site Rotten Tomatoes which compiles multiple movie reviews has rated it as "Rotten" with a rating of only 43 % fresh. The greatest sin in movie making is not to avoid anti-religious films, but not to make boring movies. You have to admire the Vatican's new commission that instead of complaining or boycotting the movie they decided to do something positive - script sabotage!

I have also heard that they have looked into sabotage of anti-Catholic films by Protestant groups but couldn't find anyway to make the scripts worse.

Now you might think that The Golden Compass falling below expectations at the box office might sink the possibilities of the two other books in the series being made into movies. New Line Cinema has been rather cagey on this possibility anyway. But The DaVinci code also fell below expectations at the box office and yet Dan Brown's Angels and Demons is still going to be made into a movie. We can cheer up though knowing that the International Commission for Anti-Catholic Movie Sabotage will once again be hard at work.

I recently had a parody post with suggestions for a Planned Parenthood motto competition. I think though that Planned Parenthood has accidentally outdone me in parody of them. Dawn Eden has once again done the web footwork and found a selection of "health communications materials" from around the world.

Yes the following materials are real.

This one was from Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria. Wouldn't Margaret Sanger be proud of this modern effort since she warned supporters in 1939 that they did not want "word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population." Children should be seen and not heard and be low in number.

Update: A commenter says I missed the obvious pun - "The Fuhrer - the Merrier." which of course is a perfect match considering that a member of her Birth Control Review was an adviser to Hitler for eugenics polices. When Hitler needed to outsource for evil he knew just where to go.

Update: Ryan from Catholic Audio contributed this:

Back to the real ones.

This is another Nigerian ad. Though maybe Planned Parenthood is just doing their part to reduce Nigerian 419 Scams by eliminating future Nigerian numbers. The odd thing about the ad is that if you are planning your family exactly why do you need protection against STDs? Or is to to plan families while at the same time having one or both member of the couple be unfaithful. That is one way to plan a family, or really to lose your family.

Once again for those "human weeds" the Nigerians.

"How far along are you with your burden" or "Have you named your burden yet" are not questions you normally hear asked of women who are pregnant. "Do you know the sex of your burden" just doesn't have the right ring to it. This though is exactly how Planned Parenthood and the Culture of Death sees children in the first place. They are burdens that rob you of your freedom and reduce your available capital. They are alright if you want to have one at the specific time you want to have one just as long as you don't have too many of them. Planned parenthood doesn't really want you to space your children, they want you to deep space your children.

This one is actually from Planned Parenthood of Utah.

Don't "Kid" yourself has to be the most ironic Banned Parenthood title ever. Though with the largest abortion provider it probably is an intentional pun. Once again this poster shows Planned Parenthood's true stripes. Children change your life for the worst is the constant drumbeat of their advertisements. They are just plain inconvenient and should be avoided at all cost. If you want a family get a dog.

Dawn Eden also has several other examples.

Mulier Fortis tagged me with this meme.

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? Wrapping paper. As a kid I was pretty good at wrapping and use to create my own custom bows. Though I did end up having to wrap presents for everyone else
2. Real tree or artificial? Sometime real, sometimes artificial
3. When do you put up the tree? After thanksgiving I put up my Advent tree. Yeah Advent Tree which mysteriously turns into a Christmas tree on the 3rd week of Advent.
4. When do you take the tree down? Feast of the Epiphany.
5. Do you like eggnog? Never tried it.
6. Favourite gift received as a child? A cassette player.
7. Do you have a Nativity scene? Yes.
8. Hardest person to buy for? Jesus, it's his birthday after all. What do you buy for the person who made everything. Thinking about this though maybe I should buy him something I like, that way if he doesn't show up to pick up his present I can use it till he picks it up.
9. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? As a kid I hated getting clothes.
10. Mail or email Christmas cards? Snail mail.
11. Favourite Christmas Movie? I am not good at picking just one favourite. "It's a wonderful Life" is probably it. Though I also love "Elf" and "A Christmas Story." Plus I guess "Die Hard" is a Christmas movie since it takes place during Christmas. Though the problem with Christmas movies is that they are basically movies that take place at Christmas, but are not about Christmas itself. I am still waiting for a truly good Nativity story on the level of "The Passion of the Christ" which I watch every year on Good Friday. From the reviews I had read of "A Nativity Story", which I will probably watch this year, show it was not up to the quality artistic retelling I want.
    
    Almost every movie that gets made for this time of year has the message "don't be selfish and spend time with family." While the message itself is good, we need to spend time with our family and the Holy Family. The trend in Hollywood movies released for Christmas in the last several years such as "Christmas with the Kranks" are only getting worse.
12. When do you start shopping for Christmas? No set date other than being prior to Christmas.
13. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? No.
14. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Candy canes.
15. Clear lights or colored on the tree? Colored lights for all of you clear light heretics!
16. Favourite Christmas song? Like I said I am not good at picking just one favourite. It would have to be something like "The Boar's Head Carol", "Hark the Herald Angel's sing", "The first Noel." I pretty much love most traditional Christmas carols - you know the ones that actually mention Christ.
17. Travel at Christmas or stay home? Stay home. My worst Christmas was one at sea.
18. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeer? Probably not without getting some mixed up with The Seven Dwarfs.
19. Angel on the tree top or a star? Angel.
20. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning? Morning. When my kids were younger they got to open one on Christmas Eve.
21. Most annoying thing about this time of year? That it ends. Other than that it would be the war against Christmas.
22. Best thing about this time of year? Celebrating the Incarnation. Okay that was the first pious thought that popped into my head. There is just so much to love about this time of year where even though the popular culture does it best to suppress it, they can't totally suppress that we are celebrating the birth of the Messiah. As hard as they try to turn this into a generic unspecified holiday season, they are still not quite effective. After all a major step in my conversion was because secular radio stations stopped playing traditional Christmas carols and I was chased into the realm of Protestant radio to find the songs I loved since I was an atheist child.

I am always delighted to receive a book by Zaccheus Press because I know without a doubt it will be excellent. They publish fine books that are really classics and when I receive their latest I put it at the top of my pile to read. Priestblock 25487 - A Memoir of Dachau was written by Father Jean Bernard who was a priest from Luxemburg who was arrested by the Nazi (for what he never knew) and placed into Dachau. After the invasion of Luxemburg which was a predominant Catholic country many priest were arrested since they were seen as being too patriotic and as leaders of their communities.

In Dachau the priests and other clergy were separated from the general population and placed in their own barracks. At times they were treated better or worse than the other prisoners and when they were treated better it was done to isolate them and to provoke envy. Many are aware of the stories of Catholics such as Saint Maxmillian Kolbe and Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross who both died at Auschwitz and Blessed Titus Bradsma who died at Daschau where this book takes place. But normally we only have the details of the ends of their lives in the concentration camp and not the daily details.

Reading this book the phrase "The Banality of Evil" coined by Hannah Arendt kept ringing through my head. The details of daily life which mostly grew from bad to worst are chronicled in such a fashion that as much as is humanly possible you really start to see what life in these circumstance was like. The casual violence of the camp guards and the prisoners serving as capos is so hard to fathom. Even the camp photographer who took pictures as the prisoners first came placed a spike in a spring-loaded chair to hurt and to surprise prisoners as they sat down for their photographs. This type of cruel behavior was the norm and not the exception. We might like to think that they managed to find the most cruel human beings to work at such camps, but the reality is how the culture of these camps so easily corrupted those in it. This was a true culture of death and we can see the effects that the current culture of death also has towards human lives.

One of the things best communicated in the book was the constant hunger of the prisoners. Even reading the words it is hard to imagine people living on such small rations and then performing the labor that they did. His description of seeing a Dandelion in a field and his plans to pull it up and eat it can give you some idea about the hunger Prisoners were watched constantly and the guards generally would not let them try to eat anything they might find. He tracked the Dandelion for a couple of days looking for an opportunity to pluck it up which he finally did. But he also knew that several other prisoners were trying to do the same. At one point you read of his joy of receiving just a spoonful of soup. Many people simply did not survive these conditions or became so weak that they were just gassed.

Father Jean Bernard is quite frank about conditions and his own behavior. He doesn't sugar-coated anything to make himself look better, though you quite easily see his life of faith and the simple joys in quite mundane things. Especially poignant is his description of when they were able to get a hold of a Eucharistic host after they had been denied Mass for quite awhile. At first they had allowed Mass but this privilege was soon removed. The Germans often took out punishments on the priests in response to criticisms by the Vatican of the Nazi's and by actions of the German and other Bishops. When the camp guards noticed that prisoners would try to be around a chapel that held the Eucharist - they painted the windows black.

Quite beautiful is his description of friendships with people he knew before and come to know in the camp. The extreme difficulties of both hunger and physical ailments and how the prisoners would sacrifice to help each other out is quite amazing. Prisoners who already were living on a diet that barely sub stained them would give bread or other food to those who were in even more desperate need. In the midst of such cruelty there was also so much love.

I highly recommend this book and while it might seem more like Lenten than Advent fare it is still a good, but at times difficult, read.

John Allen Jr. in today's daily column.

As part of a broad initiative to promote Eucharistic adoration, the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy is proposing that religious women “spiritually adopt priests” through prayer before the Eucharist, and, more generally, that Catholics from every corner of the world spend time before the Eucharist to pray for vocations to the priesthood in an era of priest shortages.

Concretely, the Congregation for Clergy is proposing that each diocese appoint a priest whose full-time job would be to promote Eucharistic adoration, and that special “Eucharistic shrines” be created that would resemble the well-known Marian shrines that dot the Catholic world.

Eucharistic adoration is a practice in which the Blessed Sacrament, meaning a consecrated host believed to be the Body of Christ, is exposed publicly for prayer and adoration. When this adoration is carried out continuously 24 hours a day, the practice is known as “perpetual adoration.”

The congregation also suggests that parishes, dioceses and religious orders seek donors to fund the construction of these shrines, as well as to pay for monstrances (a decorated vessel containing the consecrated host), liturgical vestments, and educational materials explaining the purpose of the devotion.

The congregation asks that Eucharistic adoration be introduced in parishes, seminaries, religious houses and other Catholic facilities. Bishops are requested to fill out a form indicating their intention to cooperate.

Consecrated women in particular are urged to "spiritually adopt priests in order to help them with their self-offering, prayer and penance" by engaging in Eucharistic adoration, following the example, Vatican officials say, of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The proposals come in a letter to all the bishops of the world, along with an accompanying leaflet outlining the project, to be released tomorrow, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The letter is signed by Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, Prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, and Archbishop Mauro Piacenza, the congregation’s secretary.

Hummes says the idea is to stress the “ontological link between the Eucharist and the priesthood,” as well as “the special maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary for each priest.” The initiative is styled as a response to a call from Pope Benedict XVI in his apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, released last February as the concluding document from the October 2005 Synod on the Eucharist. In that text, Benedict urged wider practice of Eucharistic adoration.

This is a great initiative and the obvious one, but it seems so often in diocesan vocations programs one that is missing. I love the idea of having someone dedicated to the promotion of Eucharistic Adoration in a diocese. Eucharistic Adoration is back on the rise, though it would be great for more parishes to offer it more frequently or even to have perpetual adoration especially under the guiding connection of the Eucharist in the priesthood. The spiritual adoption of priests by women's religious is also nothing new as is evident by the practice of the Missionaries of Charity, Saint Therese, and many others throughout history, but it is something that needs once again to be emphasized and to be put back into wider practice. I think we should also spiritually adopt seminarians within our diocese.

One thing I find odd about John Allen's Jr. column this time is his thinking that he has to explain Eucharist Adoration and what a monstrance is. This isn't exactly an obscure part of Catholic teaching or practice. Though I guess maybe he knows better the audience of the National Catholic Reporter.

With all the talk today of Mitt Romney's "Faith and America" speech and the reference to JFK's speech I decided to actually read the JFK speech to the Southern Baptist Leaders in 1960. Wow what an overrated speech that was and it is quite horrid in parts with it's modern view of Church/State separation that is quite rigid. It was interesting to read that JFK was opposed to having an ambassador to the Vatican and in fact it wasn't till President Reagan that we had an ambassador to the Holy See. It is certainly not a speech that religious conservatives today would much like, but maybe it had helped him with borderline anti-Catholics. Though I think the funniest thing in hindsight is the idea of JFK being beholden to the Catholic Church in any way in the first place.

Mitt Romney's speech on the other hand concentrates mostly on faith in public life and not his own faith for the most part and in fact he only mentions Mormons once. His view of church and state separation is much better than JFK's and closer to what the founders actually intended.

..."We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

..."There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes President he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.

" I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the Evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims. As I travel across the country and see our towns and cities, I am always moved by the many houses of worship with their steeples, all pointing to heaven, reminding us of the source of life's blessings.

Interesting remarks about the Catholic Mass. He must not have been to Mass at the Church John Kerry attends in Boston. Though if I were a Lutheran I think I would be miffed at Mitt. I don't think "confident independence" is going to be a advertising motto for Lutheran churches anytime soon. "You look confidently independent. Are you a Lutheran per chance?"

..."Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.

With Mormonism such a statement is more important considering that their current "prophet" can receive new revelation as has happened in the past. Maybe one day they will have one on caffeine to help out Starbucks in Utah. But if you believe in this Mormon doctrine where new revelation can contradict older ones than saying that this could have no influence on presidential decisions is to say he is not a faithful Mormon. JFK's at least said he would step down in some theoretical case his faith conflicted with his presidency. But the purpose of this speech in the first place is to satisfy those who are concerned about his being a Mormon and it is not surprising he takes this tack, but I don't think it helps his credibility by saying so and his credibility is already his major liability.

Jimmy Akin is not impressed with the speech and mentions how Romney wants to have it both ways. I agree with Jimmy on how the "Religious test" was misrepresented from the Constitution. Voters certainly can have a religious test in making their decisions. If a candidate was part of some doomsday cult than surely you can knock him out of contention just for that.

His speech is just too generic on faith in public life and has little to do with him as a Mormon. He obviously perceived his Mormonism as a problem to be addressed, but this speech doesn't do it. For me there are a lot more issues I am concerned about with Mitt Romney than his Mormonism.

I heard Donny Osmond the other day in a interview he did that included a defense of Mormonism where he talked about believing what the Council of Nicea said which he thought took place sometime in the 900's. And here I thought Mormons held that the Church became corrupted pretty much right away. Though you always do have to wonder just how much Mormons really know about their faith and its distinctive from Christianity. Those Latter Day Saint commercials constantly on TV never seem to mention Polytheism or the name of the planet God the Father came from.

Once again Commonweal is trying to have it both ways. The recent statement by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) concerning the morality of removing feeding tubes from patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) is being attacked for not fitting the traditional criteria in their opinion. Yes now Commonweal want to appeal to tradition and this time their can be no doctrinal development. Someone how they are able to take in developments by Pope John Paul II on the death penalty, but can't take in his view on artificial nutrition.

But mainly their whole argument is false in saying that "appears to contradict the traditional criteria used to determine whether a particular medical treatment is ordinary and proportionate and therefore obligatory, or extraordinary and disproportionate and therefore optional." The statement by the CDF does no such thing. The CDF is not contradicting or eliminating these terms, they are simply saying that artificial nutrition and hydration for those diagnosed as PVS should can not be denied.

Somehow also progressives who can get totally behind moral relativity can't seem to understand that due to medical progress that what once was extraordinary and disproportionate can become ordinary and proportionate. Yes progressives can't get a handle on progress. They have no problem with artificial birth control, but draw the line at artificial nutrition.

Whether patients who are incapable of feeding themselves and will never regain consciousness can be said to be dying is part of the moral conundrum surrounding PVS.

Though of course they don't mention that the mistaken diagnosis of PVS is quite high and the there has even been progress with some medicines to bring people back to consciousness. Regardless though someone's current state of consciousness does not remove their human dignity or the duty of those who care for them to give them food and water.

As Sulmasy notes, most people’s reaction to the prospect of being kept alive in a condition like Terri Schiavo’s is one of horror. That moral instinct has long been recognized in Catholic teaching, as has the distinction between removing feeding tubes from someone in PVS, thus allowing him to die, and intending his death.

So I guess peoples reactions is much more important than a moral imperative to feed those who are sick. Peoples reaction to the thought of quadriplegic is also one of horror - so lets kill them to. So much for "For I was hungry, and you gave me not to eat: I was thirsty, and you gave me not to drink." and "Amen I say to you, as long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me." Amen I say to the editors of Commonweal by pulling the proverbial plug from the least of them you are doing it to Him.

As a blogger who sees lots and lots of headlines through various sources there is one thing I would love to do. I wish I could write a search and replace macro virus that would go through all of the various news organization style guides and make some changes.

Headline writers are just getting too lazy. One word I especially see used way too much is "slam" or "slams" Apparently everyday somebody is slamming something. In fact later generations if they go by news sources will be convinced that at one point there was an Pope who took the name of Slams since so many headlines say Pope Slams this and Pope Slams that. Though it isn't just the pope who gets the slam treatment, it is used throughout all headlines on just about any topic.

In almost all cases slam can be replaced with "disagree" or "criticizes." I guess those words just aren't as sexy for headline writers. But surely people get desensitized to always using slam and it will be less likely to catch your eyes.

Divorce is not just a family matter. It exacts a serious toll on the environment by boosting the energy and water consumption of those who used to live together, according to a study by two Michigan State University researchers.

The analysis found that cohabiting couples and families around the globe use resources more efficiently than households that have split up. The researchers calculated that in 2005, divorced American households used between 42 and 61 percent more resources per person than before they separated, spending 46 percent more per person on electricity and 56 percent more on water.

They needed a study for this? Think of the time and money they could have saved if they knew the aphorism "Two can live cheaper than one." Couples can announce to their environmentally conscience parents "We have good news. We are going to be combining water and electric bills."

This line of thought though can also be used to justify "shacking up" that they would be environmentally irresponsible if they didn't shack up.

A reader sent me a sample of how New Line Cinema is deceptively using a review from the USSCB's Office for Film & Broadcasting.

First it is dishonest to say that it is the USSCB that said this, but that is the least of the problem.

The part they put in quotes does not actually exist in the review. They have cobbled it together from two different sections of the review.

Whatever author Pullman's putative motives in writing the story, writer-director Chris Weitz's film, taken purely on its own cinematic terms, can be viewed as an exciting adventure story with, at its core, a traditional struggle between good and evil, and a generalized rejection of authoritarianism.

and

To the extent, moreover, that Lyra and her allies are taking a stand on behalf of free will in opposition to the coercive force of the Magisterium, they are of course acting entirely in harmony with Catholic teaching.

They didn't even do a Maureen Down and put in ellipses.

I sent off some emails to New Line Cinema's Press Contacts, though I doubt if I will get a reply.

Though I also do wonder how non-Catholics might see the endorsement and if if it a negative in their case?

Update: New Line Cinema emailed me back with this reply "We have been alerted yesterday about this matter and we have changed the text -- it takes 24 hours for the online change and it will happen sometime today --." So if anybody sees the new text of the ad let me know what it is.

One of the cool things about getting some books to review is that I often receive books I probably would never have read otherwise. There are just so many books that I want to read that reading triage can be quite difficult. The Listening Heart: Vocation And the Crisis of Modern Culture by A.J. Conyers is a book that I more-than-likely not known about or read, but I am glad that I did. One great thing abut reading some books is that you are introduced more deeply in a subject you might not have thought too much about and are able to tap into the experience and thoughts of someone who has done this.

This book is a critique of modern culture and how it is that the loss of the sense of vocation has contributed to problems. He uses vocation in the wider sense of being called and not in the sense of what he refers to as "monastic vocations" or how Catholics would use the term also referring to marriage and the single life. The loss of God in culture of course results in a loss of the sense of vocation. Going through history he aptly shows how this disconnect of loss of vocation, that we are called from something outside ourselves, has damaged culture. Radical individualism is one of the fallouts from the so-called enlightenment that has infected everyone. Christians who should know that they are called often fall for this individualism. I have often thought how absurd the idea of the self-made man is, yet it is one we usually accept without question.

Much of his critique of modern culture rings true to me and I especially enjoyed his chapters on distraction and attention that really highlighted for me some of the problems and especially how modern culture is a distracted one. We live in a culture that often talks about community, connectedness, social networking, etc where very little true community actually exists and where we elevate acquaintances to friends and have very few true friends. It is also interesting how he displays how this loss of vocation results in everything being seen in terms of power and how the modern interpretation of tolerance leads to this.

A.J. Conyers who died in 2004 of cancer was a theology professor at Baylor University and he finished this book just before he died. There is a Protestant perspective in part of what he writes, but he frequently refers to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and other Catholic theologians and he also often refers to the writings of Flannery O'Connor in this work. The subject matter of the book and the critique is a Christian perspective and one that does not suffer from church/denomination divides.

I consider a good book as one that helps you to see something you didn't see before or to see something more clearly. By that definition this is certainly a good book.

Today must be anti-Catholic film day today on the Curt Jester. This is from the Catholic League.

On December 7, Gener8Xion Entertainment, a prominent Protestant film company, will release “Noëlle.” Catholic League president Bill Donohue disputes the claim that the movie is merely “a parable of forgiveness and grace”:

“We’ve seen the movie and it’s a gem. In the synopsis provided by Gener8Xion, it accurately describes Jonathan Keene as ‘a young Catholic priest seemingly devoid of genuine human emotion’; his job is ‘to do what he does best: shut down a failing parish.’ Then there is ‘the child-like Fr. Simeon Joyce, a faithful but disillusioned priest who blatantly disregards church regulations, uses church monies to pay an old fisherman’s medical bills and spends most of his time drinking at the local pub.’ Both priests are portrayed as losers.

“Viewers learn that the only reason Fr. Keene became a priest is because he felt guilty about getting a girl pregnant when he was in college; to top things off, he pressured her to have an abortion. Fr. Joyce, the alcoholic, has serious reservations about celibacy and his idea of heaven is a jolly good Christmas party. Fr. Joyce tells Fr. Keene he wants to marry a woman named Marjorie so he can help raise her illegitimate kid, saying he ‘made a vow to God not to the Church.’ But Fr. Keene, a first-class klutz, is also in love with the same woman: he is shown bolting in the middle of Midnight Mass to be with her, knocking over a filled chalice and ripping off his vestments.

“Throughout the film, confession is trivialized, celibacy is ridiculed, the Virgin Mary is disrespected, nuns are belittled, last rites are mocked, and priestly vocations are caricatured. In short, that which is uniquely Catholic is trashed. However, the plot and the acting are so deliriously absurd that it is impossible for us to get too worked up about this flick.

“It means nothing that the movie has a pro-life message. Stereotypes about Protestant ministers abound, raising the question, Why didn’t Gener8Xion choose to mock one of their own clergy? Similarly, given that the film’s writer, David Hall, has said that his primary interest was in ‘dealing with hypocrisy,’ why didn’t he consult with Sen. Charles Grassley about all those ‘prosperity church’ pastors being investigated for ripping off their flock? We know why, and that’s why the Catholic League exists.”

I haven't written much about the movie adaptation of the Golden Compass. Others such as Carl Olson at Insight Scoop has been doing in depth coverage of this much better than I could. But I do find a couple of things interesting about the debate.

For one what was the last time you heard the people involved with a movie basically brag about how far the movie adaptation is from the book? Usually you will here excuses in book adaptations giving an apology of why the screenplay has to be different from the novel. In this case though they go on about how they toned down elements of the novel to not be so anti-religious. So in a way they are admitting they are making a movie based on an anti-religious book. The actors involved have made all kinds of statements on how the movie is not anti-Catholic. I would like to hear one interviewer asking them if the novels are? If someone did a movie adaptation of The Elders of the Protocol of Zion and then said they toned down the anti-Semitic parts of it would they get away with this?

I also find it interesting that Pullman in his trilogy where the message of atheism trumps storytelling had to be done in an alternate time line. When you think of atheistic materialism you don't often think, if at all, about having dæmons as an animal-formed, shape-shifting manifestation of people's souls. Sounds a lot like to me of an Indian spirit guide. This is not to say that atheists aren't allowed to use fantasy as a story telling vehicle. It just seems to me to be a poor vehicle for preaching materialism.

The whole debate though went off the end when a Zenit reader wrote Coke about their sponsorship of the movie and received this reply.

"We appreciate the opportunity to respond to your concerns.

" The Golden Compass movie is a story about friendship, love, loyalty, tolerance, courage and responsibility. This movie also provides an opportunity for Coca-Cola to help raise awareness about climate change and the perilous state of the polar bear.

"We do not believe that this fantasy movie is an attack on any religion. We would never support a film that intentionally antagonized or condemned any faith."

So I guess a CGI armored bear dæmon in a alternate timeline fantasy movie is really going to help awareness for real Polar Bears. Did you know that Finding Nemo raised awareness for mercury levels in fish? This has got to be the silliest defense I have ever heard. But as Carl Olson said "Didn't Al Gore already make a fantasy movie about climate change and polar bears? " So what Coke wants us to believe is that a movie that has the Magisterium as the enemy, talks about suppression of heresy, has the agents of the Magisterium called friars, includes a renegade priest is not an attack on any religion. I mean it is not like there is any faith that has a Magisterium includes friars and priests and condemns heresy. Oh wait.

Now I am not into boycotts, I am just into knowledge and honesty. That parents should be aware of the trilogies agenda and that while the movie tones this down it remains evident even by secular reviewers in the New York Post.

I just wanted to complain that there is only one decent action sequence in this lavishly produced flick — a fight between two CGI bears that drew the only reaction from the audience at last night’s screening at the Empire — and reams of dull exposition. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League has been publicizing the movie by claiming it’s an anti-religious tract, as much as it pains me to say so, this self-appointed no-nothing may actually have something of a point. You don’t need to be a Jesuit scholar to figure out that the film’s bad guys who keep complaining about heretics — led by Nicole Kidman, looking even more like a CGI character than those bears — are clearly meant to be reps of the Catholic Church, even before you get a glimpse of their Vatican-like headquarters.

If you are going to make a movie that is a veiled attack on specifically the Catholic Church, but really any faith - then at least have the courage to say you are doing so.

It use to be that I could at least admire Pullman's frank discussion about his books and was quite above board about his atheism. His love of truth though seems to have gone out the window when it comes to defending the movie. He complains about Bill Donohue calling him an militant atheist out to convert people when he has in fact said - as Jimmy Akin has chronicled.

In an interview published in the Washington Post (Feb. 19, 2001), he stated:

“’ I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief,’ says Pullman. ‘Mr. Lewis [C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia] would think I was doing the Devil's work.’”

Similarly, in an interview published in the Sydney Morning Herald (Dec. 13, 2003), Pullman stated:

“I've been surprised by how little criticism I've got. Harry Potter's been taking all the flak. I'm a great fan of J.K. Rowling, but the people—mainly from America's Bible Belt—who complain that Harry Potter promotes Satanism or witchcraft obviously haven't got enough in their lives. Meanwhile, I've been flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God.”

Though in the books he doesn't have much imagination when it comes to God and what he has done is setup a strawgod to knock down.

There has also been some controversy over the USSCB positive movie review by the same person who loved Brokeback Mountain and later had to revise his rating.

Msgr. Eric Barr has coverage of this along with American Papist.

Update: A reader who has written to to New Line Cinema let me know that they are using the USCCB review and saying"this movie is 'entirely in harmony with Catholic teaching.' " What the reviewers actually wrote was:

To the extent, moreover, that Lyra and her allies are taking a stand on behalf of free will in opposition to the coercive force of the Magisterium, they are of course acting entirely in harmony with Catholic teaching.

So blatant dishonesty is no problem for New Line Cinema. They were only talking about one aspect of the movie, though of course reviewers Harry Forbes and John Mulderig statement is pretty problematic in the first place.

From St. Frances Cabrini Parish website and their statement on reconciliation.

With this history in mind we commit ourselves and our community to:

* Reach out to the gay/lesbian community, encouraging them to join our parish;
* Regularly publish our welcome in the gay press;
* Promise to educate ourselves about gay/lesbian issues and work to overcome stereotypes;
* Include a gay/lesbian perspective in catechesis at all levels, including elementary school age;
* Support lesbians and gay men in ways that promote stable, healthy relationships;
* Publicly bless the relationships of a same sex couple after the couple completes a process of discernment similar to that completed by heterosexual couples before marriage; *
* Stand willing to accept qualified, openly gay or lesbian priests or lay ministers;
* Zealously work for and guard the civil rights of lesbians and gay men, knowing that all of our civil rights are compromised when theirs are;
* Pray for greater understanding and acceptance of gay, and lesbian people in official Church teaching;
* Encourage other parishes to become publicly reconciled with the gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual community.


* Not being implemented at this time.

As you might expect they start with St. Paul statement about their being neither "Jew nor Greek" to set the tone. Apparently there is neither sin nor scandal either.

Now I have a question? What would they call their discernment process that would be similar to pre-Cana for heterosexual couples? Pre-Sodom doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Okay that's a cheap shot, but this glorification of homosexual acts and the promotion of a phony equality with marriage between a man and a women deserves ones. They also rob those who struggle with same-sex attraction from the truth. The problem with liberal churches is that their is no call for repentance unless of course you are a homophobe. The saying is that the greatest trick of the Devil is that he gets people to not believe in him. Likewise the greatest trick of liberal Christianity is to get people to not believe in sin or consequences.

Now since they put an asterisk on blessing gay marriages I guess "Not being implemented at this time." makes it just fine. Previously the Vatican intervened to have gay pride pages removed from another Minneapolis parish St. Joan of Arc. Most likely we will have to wait for Bishop John C. Nienstedt to become the Archbishop before these problems are rectified.

Lifesite had previously reported on Fr. Leo Tibesar leadership activities in the group dissident group Dignity. Yet it is after that that Fr. Tibesar was made the pastor of this parish. Nobody can say they were surprised. Even stranger is that for years Fr. Tibesar has been involved in the diocese programs for preparing couples for marriage - especially since he seems to have no idea what marriage is in the first place.

Speaking of his Excellency Most Reverend John Nienstedt, Coadjutor Archbp. of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Last week Nick Coleman had a critical article on him regarding a column he wrote. As somewhere quite aware of Nick Coleman and the fact that his columns are routinely fisked for their inaccuracies I knew exactly what to expect before I read the column.

This week though the Coadjutor Archbishop has responded to his column.

In a Nov. 28 column, Nick Coleman accuses me of not being compassionate toward friends and relatives of persons with same-sex attractions. I vigorously deny the charge. For 13 years I prepared priesthood candidates for celebrating the Sacrament of Penance by counseling them to welcome persons with warmth, compassion and understanding. Anyone who has celebrated that same sacrament with me knows I follow my own advice.

What Coleman wants is for the church I represent to be accepting and compassionate toward homosexual acts and lifestyles. And that can never be.

Coleman further claims the Catechism of the Catholic Church does not say that homosexual acts are a "grave evil." What it does say is the following: "Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity (Genesis 19: 1-29, Romans 1: 24-27, 1 Corinthians 6: 10, 1 Timothy 1:10), tradition has always declared that �homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.� ... Under no circumstances can they be approved."

As a priest and bishop, I have the responsibility before God and in the name of Jesus Christ to call all men and women to conversion, the first step of which is recognizing sinful activity for what it is. Sometimes that is not a comfortable thing to do, but it is always the compassionate thing to do.

JOHN C. NIENSTEDT, ST. PAUL;
COADJUTOR ARCHBISHOP,
ARCHDIOCESE OF ST. PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS

After the original column I saw an email exchange between Leon Suprenant and Nick Coleman that was quite instructive. It was a very civil discourse, but Coleman's reading of Nienstedt statement was that it was his intention to make a political statement, that he was telegraphing the diocese that he was a conservative. It is understandable how Nick Coleman sees it this way since he sees everything with political lenses. That opposition to homosexual acts is a conservative thing and not a specifically moral one for him and for many others. The one thing they can't accept is that people can oppose homosexual acts out of love for the person with same-sex attraction.

A reader let me know that some references to the book "A Daring Promise: A Spirituality of Marriage" By Richard R. Gaillardetz have been removed from the USCCB's marriage website. Last month Catholics United for the Faith and myself reported on the book of the month club selection by this know dissident The review of the book has now been purged from the site and from the book of the month archive. Though there are still some references to this book on their site.

This is from one of my older posts that is unfortunately still true.

Being that this is the first Sunday of Advent I thought it might be useful to give some information about this season. Advent is a shortened form of the the word Advertisement, of course you probably already knew that. This time of year we get blasted by advertisements day and night to buy gifts and to attend sales. There are some groups that contend that Advertisement actually starts on Black Friday and that this is in fact the first day of the Celebration that merchandiser consider Good Friday. During the season of Advertisement we are suppose to be of good cheer for some amorphous reason that is never quite mentioned. Rumor has it that it all leads up to the event of some child born a while ago that takes place on Christmas Day. Who this child was is not important just that we should know that the season is all about family and buying stuff. During Advertisement people say Happy Holiday's to each other. The reason for this is that during this time Malls decorate with lots of Holly so people have considered this to be Holly days. There are also other joyful greetings like Season Greetings and 40 percent off. People spend time in thanks that they have not yet exceeded their credit limit and they might forget that they have a Savior, but they will remember the savings. During the season of Advertisement the days are still 24 hours but are measured in shopping days instead. It is also a tradition for this season to be some what penitential. Penances such as having to park in overflow parking two miles away from the mall are common. After Christmas comes Advertisementide. This is the ad season of after Christmas sales and even more discounts. Later on in the shopping season comes the season of Lent. This is because you have to get money lent to you to pay off your shopping bills.

There are also some customs associated with Advertisement such as the Advertisement Wreath. Each week you take all of your junk mail and roll it up and tighten it with a rubber band and place it in your Advertisement Wreath. The third week it is traditional to use advertisements from red tag sales. You can also make or order a Advertisement Calendar, though most calendars come advertisements this is a special edition where you mark off shopping days so you know when to panic when you haven't got everything on your list. So relax and have a happy Advertisement for whatever reason we are suppose to be sellebrating.

Some people have asked about making available the file I made that converted the Pope's new encyclical Spe Salvi from text to speech. I had processed the file to remove references in parenthesis and footnotes to make it better to listen to.

I have two versions of the file one as an mp3 that was converted using AT&T's Natural Voice Mike and the other in AAC format using the Alex voice the comes with OSX Leopard. Unfortunately I did not have any voices with a slight German accent.

If you want the file you can go here and select the file of your choice

Two years ago I decided to create my own Advent Wreath graphic instead of just using the normal animated gif that I used previously. If you would like it for your own blog you can use the html code below which uses some homepage server space that won't effect the bandwidth for my blog. I will replace the graphic each week so that it correctly shows the number of candles that should be lit. On Christmas I will change it to another graphic I created for Christmastide.

<img src="http://home.comcast.net/%7Ecurtjester/curtjester_advent.gif" width="170" height="189">

Additionally underneath my Advent graphic on my left side I have created a JavaScript that gives a countdown to Christmas. If you want to do the same thing you can insert this script into your blog template with the following code underneath where you place the graphic. Though WordPress.com users would be out of luck since they don't allow JavaScript.

<!-- Christmas Countdown - Jeff Miller--> <script language="JavaScript"> function eventcount() { var now = new Date(); var message = ""; var event = new Date("Dec 25 2007 00:00:01"); var seconds = (event - now) / 1000; var minutes = seconds / 60; var hours = minutes / 60; var days = hours / 24; if ( (days%1)<.5) days++; days = Math.round(days); if (hours< 0 && hours >= -24) message = "Merry Christmas; Christ is born!"; else if (days > 0) message = "Only "+days+" praying day"+ (days>1?'s':'')+ " till Christmas!"; document.write("<p>"+message+"</p>"); } eventcount(); </script> <!-- End Christmas Countdown -->

In a NYT op-ed we find out that the Gospel of Judas was not written by a Gnostic fanboy of Judas after all.

AMID much publicity last year, the National Geographic Society announced that a lost 3rd-century religious text had been found, the Gospel of Judas Iscariot. The shocker: Judas didn’t betray Jesus. Instead, Jesus asked Judas, his most trusted and beloved disciple, to hand him over to be killed. Judas’s reward? Ascent to heaven and exaltation above the other disciples.

It was a great story. Unfortunately, after re-translating the society’s transcription of the Coptic text, I have found that the actual meaning is vastly different. While National Geographic’s translation supported the provocative interpretation of Judas as a hero, a more careful reading makes clear that Judas is not only no hero, he is a demon.

Several of the translation choices made by the society’s scholars fall well outside the commonly accepted practices in the field. For example, in one instance the National Geographic transcription refers to Judas as a “daimon,” which the society’s experts have translated as “spirit.” Actually, the universally accepted word for “spirit” is “pneuma ” — in Gnostic literature “daimon” is always taken to mean “demon.”

Likewise, Judas is not set apart “for” the holy generation, as the National Geographic translation says, he is separated “from” it. He does not receive the mysteries of the kingdom because “it is possible for him to go there.” He receives them because Jesus tells him that he can’t go there, and Jesus doesn’t want Judas to betray him out of ignorance. Jesus wants him informed, so that the demonic Judas can suffer all that he deserves.

Perhaps the most egregious mistake I found was a single alteration made to the original Coptic. According to the National Geographic translation, Judas’s ascent to the holy generation would be cursed. But it’s clear from the transcription that the scholars altered the Coptic original, which eliminated a negative from the original sentence. In fact, the original states that Judas will “not ascend to the holy generation.” To its credit, National Geographic has acknowledged this mistake, albeit far too late to change the public misconception.

So what does the Gospel of Judas really say? It says that Judas is a specific demon called the “Thirteenth.” In certain Gnostic traditions, this is the given name of the king of demons — an entity known as Ialdabaoth who lives in the 13th realm above the earth. Judas is his human alter ego, his undercover agent in the world. These Gnostics equated Ialdabaoth with the Hebrew Yahweh, whom they saw as a jealous and wrathful deity and an opponent of the supreme God whom Jesus came to earth to reveal.

Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas was a harsh critic of mainstream Christianity and its rituals. Because Judas is a demon working for Ialdabaoth, the author believed, when Judas sacrifices Jesus he does so to the demons, not to the supreme God. This mocks mainstream Christians’ belief in the atoning value of Jesus’ death and in the effectiveness of the Eucharist.

April D. DeConick the writer of the op-ed goes on to not that their is no satisfactory answer about how these mistakes were made. Though I think it is telling that the translation mistakes were all in one direction. She also notes how the National Geographic rush for an exclusive made real scholarship and peer review almost impossible.

Like clockwork sometime around Christmas or Easter we get some new discovery or scholarship that once again attacks Christianity and then shortly thereafter we find out that it doesn't even make it up to the level of bunk. You just got to bless those hearts at the Discovery Channel, History Channel, National Geographic, etc for giving it the old try again.

The Deacon's Bench